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AI Agent as Fresh Consultant

Treat AI coding agents like consultants you hire for specific tasks - brief them thoroughly on context, give them discrete objectives, then start fresh for new projects

Decision Rule

When starting any new development task, create a new conversation and explicitly provide only the context relevant to that specific task, rather than continuing existing conversations

How It Works

Fresh context prevents confusion from irrelevant information, maintains focus on current objective, and leverages the AI's peak performance state rather than degraded long-conversation performance

Failure Modes

Continuing conversations indefinitely (append-only pattern)

Assuming AI remembers everything from previous context

Not explicitly providing necessary context for new tasks

Mixing unrelated tasks in single conversation thread

Example Decision

Developer needs to add authentication and fix a CSS bug. Instead of asking AI to do both in one conversation, they create two separate chats: one focused entirely on authentication with relevant security context, another focused on CSS with relevant styling files and design requirements.