Context Rot: An Easily Overlooked Problem in AI Coding
Yesterday someone in a group chat said GPT-5.4 performed worse than Doubao. When they asked questions, the model would often give irrelevant answers without even reading the question. I asked a few follow-up questions and found they had fed it a lot of documents, and the conversation had gone on for many turns. This probably wasn’t the model’s problem—it was context rot. I’ve had similar experiences myself. After talking to a model for a long time, it starts “forgetting” what we discussed earlier, or repeats mistakes that were already corrected. The model hasn’t gotten stupider. The conversation has just gotten too long. ...