Every AI coding tool has the same top complaint: "it forgot what we were doing."
I spent weeks assuming that was a context-window problem. It mostly isn't. It's a filesystem problem — and you can predict which tools suffer from it by asking one question: where does the plan get written down?
The bug that made me go looking
Our own builder had it badly. You'd say "build me a CRM," the agent would plan it, start building, hit its step limit, stop. You'd type "continue" — and it would either start over from a different angle or silently drop half the plan.
The cause was mundane and a little humbling. The plan was never saved anywhere. It was a local variable inside one function, parsed out of the model's own output text, used for step tracking during that single turn, then discarded:
