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 st