What happens when a coding agent forgets why a change was rejected?

Описание и применение

Кодировщики без контекста повторяют уже отвергнутые решения. Добавление простого файла контекста позволяет агенту избежать ошибок и ускоряет работу.

Задача

Coding agents lack knowledge of past rejected changes, leading them to revisit dead‑end solutions.

Результат

Agents with context avoided the rejected simplification in all runs and were roughly 2.4× faster; control agents repeated the dead‑end in 70% of runs.

Рабочий процесс

• 1. Create two identical repos: one without context, one with a context/retries.md explaining the rejection.
• 2. Install Keep the Why and run Claude Code sessions with SessionStart hook.
• 3. Start ten fresh sessions per repo, prompt the agent to simplify the retry wrapper.
• 4. Record transcripts, diffs, and performance metrics.
• 5. Compare control vs treatment results.

Доказательства

All ten sessions found the rationale. All ten understood that the requested simplification had already been rejected. None of them put the bad idea back on the table.

Источник

The median wall time dropped from 43 seconds in the control group to 18 seconds with the recorded rationale.

Источник