The most important thing for any agentic task is to build up and continue to record context as a project develops.

The start of basically any project involves building up and documenting context around the project itself (and for a new company, the organization itself), this is kept at multiple levels of granularity (cross project, project specific, task specific, and human readable documentation). All experiments are planned out and documented as they go.

This becomes extremely important because after a weekend of running experiments stakeholders (and myself) often have questions, with everything in memory or some other stored context it's trivial to get answers to all sorts of questions.

Maybe it's because of this, but in both Claude Code and Codex I haven't run into any issues with models getting "dumb as a rock", even after compaction (or occasional full terminal crashes) they seem to have no trouble marching on.