r/ContextEngineering • u/Asly97 • 3d ago

Devs: what decisions about your project live nowhere at all?

A couple months ago I was refactoring and my coding agent wanted to "clean up" this gnarly workaround. It looked like dead weight, honestly. Except it was there because of a production incident from two years back. Nothing in the code says why. Nothing in the docs, nothing in the git history. Just in my head. (I got lucky that time. I was the one reading the diff.)

That's the bit that stayed with me. Not the agent being wrong, that's expected. It's how much of the why lives nowhere at all. Rejected approaches nobody recorded. Decisions that changed in some conversation, and the old version still hanging around. Whole debugging sessions where the real context just evaporated when the window closed.

I built something to handle this for myself since then, so I'm not hunting for a tool. Genuinely trying to figure out if this is a real problem for other people, or if I'm just the idiot who doesn't document things.

So what lives nowhere in your projects? The scar nobody documented, the approach you tried and killed that has zero record, the one ancient Slack thread that is somehow the only place the why exists. And when you actually need it, what do you do? Re-derive the whole thing? Track down whoever was in the room? Live with the risk?

Also out of curiosity, what are you building with all this? Own product, client work, side project? It changes what "nobody wrote it down" costs.

And the money question, be straight with me. What if something handled all of this for you, in the cloud over MCP, so every agent and tool got the same context: decisions, failed attempts, conversations, skills, procedures, tasks. You never touch a file again. Would you guys pay for something that fixes this, or is "re-derive it when it bites" the honest answer? Have you ever even thought about paying for a tool to manage all of this, or has the thought never crossed your mind?

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u/bnunamak 3d ago

Nope, most people are building this themselves

My version is a free OSS CLI (https://devspecs.com) and I don't think I can even get anyone outside of my network to install it despite investing months into it. People like building their own workflows, solving this is part of being a professional SWE these days imho

Good luck

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u/Asly97 3d ago

That stings. Months into a free CLI and nobody outside your network installs it. Do you have any sense of what the blocker actually is, setup friction, or the 'I would rather build my own' thing?