Comment by locknitpicker

> Shifting the focus from bloated contextual memory to structured, verifiable documentation and state boundaries is precisely the right systems-level trade-off.

Isn't memory just documentation that agents create and update on the fly to fill in the documentation hole that your average user leaves open?

There was a time when the need to provide context and signal was a key topic in LLM and AI-assisted coding. People talked about MCPs AGENTS.md and README.md and agent skills and even comments, descriptive tests, and naming conventions. Supposedly the theory was that if you provide context, agents wouldn't misbehave so much. Then plan mode and spec-kit approaches stepped in with approaches aimed at providing that context when starting sessions, because users never bothered with docs or MCPs or AGENTS.md or anything. But then plan mode and spec-kit approaches were considered too laborious and requiring too much from users. Then, because users systematically failed to provide context, this task was finally given to agents. And things just worked.

You should ask yourself why in software engineering circles documentation is seen more as a problem than a solution to any problem.