Codified Context: A chemist wrote 100K lines of game code alone. The secret was the context architecture.

The biggest weakness of AI coding agents is that they forget everything when a session ends. Project rules, past mistakes, all gone. Developers started writing rules in files like CLAUDE.md and .cursorrules, but a study of 253 CLAUDE.md files (Agentic Coding Manifests) found that a single file cannot cover a 100K-line codebase. The answer to this problem is Codified Context. In February 2026, Aristidis Vasilopoulos formalized this approach in a paper (arXiv:2602.20478). It structures project knowledge inside the codebase so that agents do not start from scratch every session. The central idea is to treat documentation as infrastructure by design. Why Structure Works: The 3-Tier Architecture What makes Codified Context different from a simple rules file is that it separates knowledge into three layers by access frequency. Tier 1 is the Constitution. A single Markdown file of about 660 lines containing coding standards, build commands, and a trigger table. It is auto-loaded at the start