I run Claude Code most of the day. The thing that kept biting me wasn't the model getting dumber. It was the model forgetting what we'd already settled, then confidently redoing it wrong.
You've probably hit it. You write a CLAUDE.md, you keep notes, you tell it "we decided X." A few prompts later it relitigates X, or quietly breaks something it fixed an hour ago. Bigger context windows didn't fix it for me either. A 1M window just means more room for stale instructions to rot in.
Here's the reframe that actually held: stop treating the model as the place the state lives.
The model is a worker, not a filing cabinet
A context window is working memory, not a record. It's lossy, it drifts, and every new turn re-derives the world from whatever's in front of it. If "what's done and what's half-broken" only exists in that window, you're trusting the most forgetful part of the system to remember the most important thing.
