Originally published on AI Tech Connect.
What you need to know AI coding assistants have a fundamental structural problem that most engineers discover through painful experience rather than by reading about it: the model's ability to stay on track degrades as the conversation grows. Each turn adds context that dilutes the original intent. By turn fifteen of a complex session, the model is optimising for plausible-looking code that satisfies the most recent message rather than the actual requirement you stated at the start. The feature compiles, the tests are green — but it does not do what you asked for. The root cause is not the model. It is the absence of a stable, machine-readable reference that the model can re-consult when its scroll-history-based working memory drifts. This is what a spec provides. A spec is not…
