The wipe script lived only on prod, untracked, which is why this was invisible: it deleted every mission and agent and left every per-repo .brain intact. Those files are in no table and no cascade reaches them, so agents kept recalling verdicts from missions that no longer existed — measured 2026-09-22, an 18,982-byte repo brain outliving its rows, and a harness assertion that failed on the correct behaviour because it asked the database what the brain remembered. Now tracked in the repo, and it clears /data/brains/*.h5 after the agent purge so "clean slate" means what it says. CLAWMATES_KEEP_BRAINS=1 keeps the old behaviour for when accumulated project knowledge is worth more than a blank start. Also documents what deliberately SURVIVES and why: corpus_items (the research seen-set, so a fresh harvest does not re-download papers already covered), judge usage rows, skills, repos, team_templates and nodes. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WZb5A2kfVfjpdwSochkuHz