That works when it's humans you can talk to. The same problem happens with AI agents though and "no, use the latest code" doesn't really help when multiple agents have each compacted their own version of what "latest" means.

I'm running Codex on a Raspberry Pi, and Claude Code CLI, Gemini CLI, and Claude in Chrome all on a Mac, all touching the same project across both machines. The drift is constant. One agent commits, the others don't know about it, and now you've got diverged realities. I'm not a coder so I can't just eyeball a diff and know which version is right.

Ended up building a mechanical state file that sits outside all the context windows. Every commit, every test run, every failed patch writes to it. When a new session starts, the agent reads that file first instead of trusting its own memory. Boring ops stuff really, but it's the only thing that actually stopped the "which version is real" problem.