How to Stop Context Rot in Coding Agents
The first hour with a coding agent is sharp. It respects your patterns, remembers your constraints, produces code that fits. Somewhere in the second hour it starts to drift. It forgets a decision it made earlier. It contradicts itself. The suggestions get vague. By the third hour you are fighting it.
You are not imagining it, and it is not the model having a bad day. It is context rot, and it has a specific, avoidable cause.
What is actually happening
Every file the agent reads, every command it runs, every dead end it explores stays in the session’s context window. Most of that is investigation: reading a test to understand why it failed, scanning a config, tracing a dependency chain. None of it is the work. All of it is the agent figuring out how to do the work.
By the time it starts implementing, the window is full...
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