Detecting Drift: Why AI Agents Need Diagnostics Over Context

While AI coding agents like Codex excel at generating code rapidly, they often introduce subtle architectural degradation—termed 'drift'—where tests pass and builds succeed despite accumulating coherence issues. The real breakthrough isn't expanding context windows, but equipping AI with diagnostic capabilities that understand implicit system rules, ownership boundaries, and architectural constraints. This reframes the AI coding challenge from raw generation speed to preserving the integrity of complex software systems.