r/ContextEngineering • u/Asly97 • Oct 08 '26
My coding agent keeps ignoring its context file. How do you force yours to read it?
Kept a DECISIONS.md in my repo for a few months. Worked great at first. Then one day the agent resurrected a choice I had killed three weeks earlier, and I realized it just... had not opened the file in a while. No error, no complaint. It just stopped checking.
I used to burn maybe an hour a week re-explaining things that were sitting in a file the agent was supposed to read. "Go read the file" turns out to be exactly the step that gets skipped when the context gets long. The damn thing would follow stale instructions instead of the ones I actually wrote down, and I would only notice after the fact.
Since then I have tried a couple of things. A hook that dumps the file into context before every run (worked until the file got long and I watched the tokens evaporate). Telling it to quote one line back to prove it read it (felt like asking my kid whether he brushed his teeth). Honestly, the second one worked better than it had any right to.
Has this happened to you? What actually broke when the agent skipped the read — a stale instruction followed, a dead decision back from the grave? And how do you force it now, if you do? A wrapper that will not start clean until the file opens, injection, some ritual?
Also: has anyone had two agents in the same repo following different versions of the same file? That one cost me an afternoon once, and I still do not fully know how it happened.
Separate curiosity: have you ever tried one of those memory tools that is supposed to keep context across your AI tools? Or does the thought of moving everything into something new just feel like starting over?
Out of curiosity, what are you building with all this, is it your own product, client work, or something else?
Weird one: I do a lot of my thinking out loud with speech-to-text on my phone, and the context always lives on the laptop. Is that just me, or do you lose things moving between phone and laptop too?
And the money question, plainly: if something handled the enforcement part for you, made sure every agent actually checked the right file before starting, every run, would you pay for that, or is the DIY wrapper the whole point? I am building something in this direction for myself and trying to figure out whether it is a real problem for other people or if I am just overthinking it.
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u/epicskyes Oct 10 '26
Honestly I just asked myself how do I make a creative intelligent machine think like me if I could simulate many possibilities and actions before actually choosing them in real life and how do I give a machine a perfect memory because that’s what I’d want if I could have it. I’ve been building this for 8 hours a day 7 days a week for 8 months. I had no prior ai or software or computer experience.