Your Context Is Poisoned

Lance Martin at LangChain published a framework for context engineering with four operations: Write, Select, Compress, and Isolate. Each operation has a failure mode. We mapped all four to real production data from our 6-agent autonomous system. The result: 4,768 violations detected. Every single one traces back to one of these four poisoned context patterns. Failure Mode 1: Stale Context (Write) Your agent's instructions were written three sprints ago. The API changed. The schema migrated. The agent keeps generating code against a version of reality that no longer exists. In our system, stale context is the most common violation category. Agent CLAUDE.md files reference file paths that have moved, cite constraints from specs that were superseded, and enforce patterns the codebase abandoned weeks ago. The fix is not better documentation. Documentation drifts by definition. The fix is structural enforcement -- L5 hooks that validate context freshness before the agent acts on it. When an