Why Your Coding Agent Got Worse Halfway Through the Session
It was sharp for an hour and now it is contradicting itself and reintroducing bugs you already fixed. That is context degradation, and it is manageable.
| Symptom | Likely cause |
|---|---|
| Reintroduces a bug you fixed | Stale file content still in context |
| Contradicts an earlier decision | Compaction lost the reasoning |
| Uses an API signature that changed | Stale read of the file |
| Ignores a constraint you stated once | Position, buried in the middle |
| Loops between two wrong approaches | Both failures in context, neither marked terminal |
| Gets slower and more hedged | Context near capacity |
Related reading: I Gave Five Models the Same Bug and Noted Each Mistake explores a connected angle.
Related reading: Debugging an MCP Server When the Agent Just Goes Quiet explores a connected angle.
Published on debugly.dev by Rohit Bhadani | Founder of Krova Cloud
