Most of us have felt it by now. The Context Tax.
Slow token bleed just to re-establish what the AI already knew last session. A real dollar cost.
But the problem started before AI tools existed. I once spent nearly a full week reverse-engineering a Django SaaS I was dropped into. Reading someone else's code. Mapping flows I had not written. Just to get to a place where I could build something new.
Then came the AI boom. Same problem, different shape.
I would return to a client project after a few months away, my own code, and stand there asking why I wrote a function that long. IDE agents helped. But every new session meant re-attaching files, re-explaining architecture, and burning 500 to 1,000 tokens before writing a single useful prompt.
