A significant benefit of the assistive agents - described in a previous post - is that they allow you to document things you learn as you develop. 

Avoid Losing Knowledge Into the Context Drift

Let me provide an example. Trying to deploy Burrow for testing to web, iOS, and Android encountered many hiccups. There was a lot of troubleshooting, and Replit did a great job helping with it, but I didn’t want to lose that knowledge when I lost context… aka context drift.

Context in AI refers to the relevant information - such as conversation history, user preferences, system instructions, and external data - that an agent uses to generate a coherent and useful response. It acts as the agent's working memory, enabling it to understand nuanced queries and provide personalized answers. 

"Falling out of context" (or "context drift") occurs when the AI agent loses track of the current topic or relevant details needed to continue a meaningful interaction. This often happens during long conversations as older, but potentially crucial, information scrolls out of the agent's limited working memory, leading to irrelevant, generic, or nonsensical responses. 

After working on a decent chunk of development, I frequently ask something like.

“Based on the work we’ve just done, what have we learned?”

I then get a summary of key things learned. After which, I prompt something like.

“Can you review the files in the agents/ folder and document these lessons in the appropriate place so they are more easily addressed in the future?”

In the prior example of lessons learned for deployment, Replit created a new agent called deployment.md to store all my best practices and make them easily accessible. This and all of the agents/ files can be called upon for code reviews, deployments, etc., to help ensure enforcement of best practices and avoid having to relearn painful lessons.

Summing It Up

The takeaway here isn't just about avoiding a development headache; it's about building a living, breathing knowledge base alongside your code. Your AI agent can turn those panicked troubleshooting sessions into permanent, accessible best practices that don’t get lost in history. Stop losing context; start preserving history’s lessons.