> no one really knows for sure how to get past the spot we all hit where the agentic project that was progressing perfectly hits a sharp downtrend in progress.

FWIW, I find this eventual degradation point comes much later and with fewer consequences when there are strict guardrails inside and outside of the LLM itself.

From what I've seen, most people try to fix only the "inside" part - by tweaking the prompts, installing 500 MCPs (that ironically pollute the context and make problem worse), yell in uppercase in hopes that it will remember etc, and ignore that automated compliance checks existed way before LLMs.

Throw the strictest and most masochistic linting rules at it in a language that is masochistic itself (e.g. rust), add tons of integration tests that encode intent, add a stop hook in CC that runs all these checks and you've got a system that is simply not allowed to silently drift and can put itself back on track with feedback it gets from it.

Basically, rather than trying to hypnotize an agent to remember everything by writing a 5000 line agents.md, just let the code itself scream at it and feed the context.