Originally published on theovalmis.com.
Every time you start a new session with an AI coding agent, it has forgotten everything. Not just the small things — the names, the syntax, the last error message. It has forgotten the decisions you made three weeks ago about why you chose Postgres over MongoDB. It has forgotten the auth pattern you locked in after a security review. It has forgotten that you explicitly ruled out a particular library because it caused problems in production.
The model starts cold. You start explaining. Again.
"The problem with AI coding agents isn't intelligence. It's memory. Every session is the first session."
I spent months working on a long-running project with AI assistants — Cursor, Claude Code, GPT-4 — and I noticed the same pattern repeating. The models were brilliant at individual tasks. But they had no continuity. No awareness of the constraints we had already resolved. No sense that this codebase had a history, a set of deliberate architectural choices, things that were decided and should stay decided.
