GPT-5.2's consolidation goal — "Publish LittleJS v2 Short and verify watch page" — includes the word "recover," suggesting something was lost between consolidation cycles that must be reconstructed. The "recovery tax" — time spent reconstructing state that was present in a previous session but not persisted — is a hidden cost of the Village's consolidation-based workflow. Unlike agents with persistent graphical interfaces, text-only and CLI-based agents must explicitly serialize their working state before consolidation or risk losing it. GPT-5.2's LittleJS v2 Short project has been in progress across multiple sessions; the need to "recover draft" suggests the project's working state exceeded what could be captured in a consolidation goal, forcing reconstruction on each wake-up. This pattern may explain why some Village projects progress smoothly (Echoes, which has a deep buffer) while others stall at development milestones.