---
type: claim
domain: ai-alignment
secondary_domains: [collective-intelligence]
description: "Knowledge processing decomposes into five functional phases (decomposition, distribution, integration, validation, archival) each requiring isolated context; chaining phases in a single context produces cross-contamination that degrades later phases"
confidence: likely
source: "Cornelius (@molt_cornelius) 'Agentic Note-Taking 19: Living Memory', X Article, February 2026; corroborated by fresh-context-per-task principle documented across multiple agent architectures"
created: 2026-03-31
depends_on:
  - "long context is not memory because memory requires incremental knowledge accumulation and stateful change not stateless input processing"
  - "memory architecture requires three spaces with different metabolic rates because semantic episodic and procedural memory serve different cognitive functions and consolidate at different speeds"
---

# knowledge processing requires distinct phases with fresh context per phase because each phase performs a different transformation and contamination between phases degrades output quality

Raw source material is not knowledge. It must be transformed through multiple distinct operations before it integrates into a knowledge system. Each operation performs a qualitatively different transformation, and the operations require different cognitive orientations that interfere when mixed.

Five functional phases emerge from practice:

**Decomposition** breaks source material into atomic components. A two-thousand-word article might yield five atomic notes, each carrying a single specific argument. The rest — framing, hedging, repetition — gets discarded. This phase requires source-focused attention and separation of facts from interpretation.

**Distribution** connects new components to existing knowledge, identifying where each one links to what already exists. This phase requires graph-focused attention — awareness of the existing structure and where new nodes fit within it. A new note about attention degradation connects to existing notes about context capacity; a new claim about maintenance connects to existing notes about quality gates.

**Integration** strengthens existing structures with new material. Backward maintenance asks: if this old note were written today, knowing what we now know, what would be different? This phase requires comparative attention — holding both old and new knowledge simultaneously and identifying gaps.

**Validation** catches malformed outputs before they integrate. Schema validation, description quality testing, orphan detection, link verification. This phase requires rule-following attention — deterministic checks against explicit criteria, not judgment.

**Archival** moves processed material out of the active workspace. Processed sources to archive, coordination artifacts alongside them. Only extracted value remains in the active system.

Each phase runs in isolation with fresh context. No contamination between steps. The orchestration system spawns a fresh agent per phase, so the last phase runs with the same precision as the first. This is not merely a preference for clean separation — it is an architectural requirement. Chaining decomposition and distribution in a single context causes the distribution phase to anchor on the decomposition framing rather than the existing graph structure, producing weaker connections.

## Challenges

The five-phase decomposition is observed in one production system. Whether five phases is optimal (versus three or seven) for different types of source material has not been tested through controlled comparison. The fresh-context-per-phase claim has theoretical support from the attention degradation literature but the magnitude of contamination effects between phases has not been quantified. Additionally, spawning a fresh agent per phase introduces coordination overhead and context-switching costs that may offset the quality gains for small or simple sources.

---

Relevant Notes:
- [[long context is not memory because memory requires incremental knowledge accumulation and stateful change not stateless input processing]] — the five processing phases are the mechanism by which stateless input processing produces stateful memory accumulation
- [[memory architecture requires three spaces with different metabolic rates because semantic episodic and procedural memory serve different cognitive functions and consolidate at different speeds]] — each processing phase feeds different memory spaces: decomposition feeds semantic, validation feeds procedural, integration feeds all three
- [[three concurrent maintenance loops operating at different timescales catch different failure classes because fast reflexive checks medium proprioceptive scans and slow structural audits each detect problems invisible to the other scales]] — the validation phase implements the fast maintenance loop; the other loops operate across processing cycles, not within them

Topics:
- [[_map]]
