Devs: have you ever caught your agent following a stale copy of your own rules?
I had a stupid realization last week: my CLAUDE.md situation had quietly turned into three separate files all claiming to be the source of truth. One in the repo. One in my home directory from months ago. One Cursor generated somewhere in .cursor that I never deleted. All slightly different.
The one that actually got me was an AGENTS.md copy inside one project that had drifted from the real thing. Something like 17KB of rules that were mostly right, except three or four things I changed months ago and never synced over. The agent had been loading that stale copy every single turn and nobody noticed, because stale rules sound perfectly plausible. It wasn't breaking anything loudly. Just following outdated guidance, confidently.
Cleaned it up by hand, obviously. But it got me thinking, how is everyone else handling this? Do you symlink everything to one canonical copy, sync them somehow, or does each project just have its own and you accept the drift? And has a stale copy ever actually burned you, like the agent following an old rule that wasted a real hour?
Also genuinely curious what people here are building with all this, own product or client work or something else entirely? And one more thing: I do a lot of my thinking out loud with speech-to-text on my phone, and the context always lives on my laptop. Is that just me, or do you carry project context on your phone somehow?
And since I'm clearly rebuilding all of this anyway: what if something handled all of it 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 has the thought of paying for a tool to manage all this never even crossed your mind?