You did the responsible thing. You added a rules file for your AI tool,
.cursorrules or CLAUDE.md or an AGENTS.md, and you wrote down the important constraints by hand. For about a week it was great.
Then entropy showed up. Your team made four new decisions and none of the Slack ones made it into the file. Someone changed the caching strategy and the rules file still describes the old one. A constraint got relaxed and nobody updated the line that enforces it. Now your agent is confidently applying last quarter's architecture, which is strictly worse than no rules at all, because it carries authority while being wrong.
This is the exact failure that kills architecture decision records, and it kills them for a structural reason, not a discipline reason. A hand-maintained context artifact depends on a human stopping, mid-flow, to write down something whose payoff is deferred and uncertain. Humans do not do that reliably. They never have. Betting your agent's correctness on it is betting on the one behavior we have decades of evidence people will not sustain.
And the cost is higher now than in the ADR days, because you are not just informing future humans. You are steering a fast agent that will take a stale rule and propagate it across a dozen files before lunch.
