The Context Rot Swarm
Stale memory, drifted tools, and evals that still pass the wrong test.
It is not one wrong document. It is a cloud of small wrongnesses that move together: deprecated APIs in tool schemas, embeddings of deleted policies, prompts that reference features that shipped under different names, eval fixtures frozen in a product reality that no longer exists, agent memories that remember a company you used to be. Individually, each insect is annoying. Together, they steer the fleet.
Symptom
Agents call tools with last quarter's argument names and the adapter silently coerces. Retrieval ranks a runbook for a product that was sunset. Evals stay green while testing the wrong behavior.
Why It Matters
Every individual item is small. The Swarm's power is alignment: stale memory, drifted tools, and obsolete evals reinforce each other, so the fleet steers confidently in a direction nobody chose.
What the Chapter Gives You
How rot propagates through tool schemas and memory stores, the freshness contracts that keep context current, and why green evals can be the strongest evidence of drift.
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