Old repository notes steer AI agents as firmly as recent ones, study finds
A developer placed a 2019 note in a repository saying the team should not use TypeScript, then asked AI models to pick a stack for a new 2026 service. Every response avoided TypeScript, even though the note was seven years old and carried no stated conditions. Testing across models showed that a note's age had almost no effect on whether it was obeyed, and telling the model the note was old barely changed results. Hiding expired entries entirely led models to recommend TypeScript every time, indicating that expiry works best as a structural feature rather than a warning. The author built whynot, an MIT-licensed tool that stores rejected decisions as dated Markdown files in a repository, with expiry dates and revisit conditions.
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