Catastrophic Remembering
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Paper summary
Agentic coding READMEs grow without bound in real repositories, stopping only when the repo retires or someone rewrites the file wholesale. This paper traces the cause to imperfect recall and gives the phenomenon a name that inverts the one continual learning is organized around.
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01
The asymmetry is the mechanism: Appending an instruction is always cheap. Once its rationale is gone, deleting it without risking a correctness regression costs O(2^