The Agent Writes Its Own Context

Wed, 23 Sep 2026 05:00:15 +0100

A debugging agent hits a failing migration test, guesses duplicated tenant identifiers as the cause, and records the guess in its progress file. Twenty turns later the window has reset. A fresh invocation reads the file, finds “Root cause: duplicated tenant IDs,” and plans the rest of its work around a fact nobody ever established. The test output that prompted the guess is long gone. The guess survived; the evidence did not. Nothing in Chapters 10 through 14 prevents this, because every mechanism so far assumed the candidate universe was given. It is not. The agent manufactures it as it works, and this chapter governs what it manufactures.

Tool Traces on Programmer.ie: Modern AI programming

The Agent Writes Its Own Context