Why audit context
An agent acts confidently whether its understanding is right or wrong. If it's working from stale or missing context, it'll produce confident mistakes — so verifying what it knows before trusting it is worth the few minutes.
An audit catches wrong assumptions before they become wrong code.
Ask it to play back
The simplest audit: ask the agent to summarize your architecture, conventions, and key constraints in its own words. What it says reveals what it actually has in context.
Gaps and errors in the playback are exactly what would have caused bad output.
Hunt for stale facts
Look for things it states that used to be true but aren't — a deprecated pattern, an old dependency, a renamed module. Stale memory is dangerous precisely because the agent trusts it.
Anything stale should be corrected at the source, not just in the chat.
Hunt for gaps
Note the constraints and decisions it doesn't mention. Missing context — a 'never do this' rule it never received — is as risky as wrong context.
Gaps tell you what to add to the memory file.
Fix the source
When you find stale or missing facts, update the project memory file, not just the current conversation — otherwise the next session repeats the problem.
Audit before big or risky tasks, and treat the memory file as the thing you're actually correcting.