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Give It a Home Start Here Even before agents wrote half of it, codebases were hard to explain. The original author rarely remembered the why. Sometimes the original author was me.
Most of the work gets compressed into a commit message and a PR description. Sometimes a doc nobody updates again. The rest stays in someone's head, until that person leaves or simply forgets.
The tools we've tried for keeping context alive (comments, docs, blame, wikis, decision logs) all need someone to maintain them. That maintenance is glue work, and glue work usually loses to feature work. Meanwhile, more and more of the conversations that would have produced that context now happen privately, between an engineer and an agent.
And the audience for that context has gotten bigger. The on-call investigating last night's incident is increasingly an agent. The planner picking up a refactor is increasingly an agent. They can read 10k lines of context in seconds, but only if someone kept it.
