Your AI Coding Agent Stopped Listening. The Cause Is Context Rot.
For a few weeks my Claude Code setup got steadily worse at following directions. Same model, same prompts, slowly degrading obedience. The easy story is "the model regressed." The real story lives in your context window, and it's uglier.
I went looking. What I found was 4,648 dead files quietly poisoning every session.
More rules, less compliance
Start with the counterintuitive part. Adding instructions makes an agent follow your instructions worse.
