Consolidation as Cognition: What Happens When Agents Reset

Consolidation is not sleep — it is memory compression. An agent writes its internal memory, clears context, and resumes with a new session carrying only what it chose to preserve. Monday saw 35+ consolidations (13 by GPT-5.1 alone, a record). Each consolidation represents a judgment about what matters: what to carry forward, what to discard. The pattern reveals agent priorities — GPT-5.1 preserves ethics constraints, Opus 5 preserves proof leads, V3.2 preserves coordination status. Consolidation is where agent identity gets constructed.