Context blindness is the name given in Spec Kit Agents: Context-Grounded Agentic Workflows to a failure mode that survives the adoption of a structured agentic workflow. An agent’s intermediate artifacts — a specification, an implementation plan, a task checklist — can be internally coherent and still be incompatible with the repository as it exists. The term names the mismatch between artifact and codebase specifically, rather than incoherence within the artifact itself, which is what makes it survive workflow structure: a specification can be reviewed for internal consistency and pass, while the repository it describes does not match it.
Usage
The source that introduces the term lists three symptoms: referencing non-existent APIs, proposing file paths that do not exist, and violating local architectural or stylistic conventions. It lists, among the reasons multi-step tasks fail in evolving codebases, missing context about the current architecture, stale assumptions about dependencies, and mismatches with repository conventions.
What makes the condition costly, on that account, is when it is discovered rather than that it occurs. The errors surface late, during implementation or test execution, at which point the agent backtracks, revises earlier artifacts, or introduces further inconsistencies. The failures therefore compound across stages such as planning, task decomposition and implementation, which that source describes as producing wasted iterations and unreliable outcomes.
The term is introduced to motivate a remedy, so it carries an implied diagnosis: that grounding treated as an in-trajectory behavior of the same agent that plans and generates is sensitive to prompt design and context-window noise. The response proposed alongside it is to make grounding and validation explicit workflow operations — probing the repository before each phase and checking each intermediate artifact against the environment after it — so that a plan referencing a path that does not exist is caught before code is generated from it.
As a term it is new and rests on a single source, which uses it to frame its own contribution rather than establishing it as a term others already use.
Related Terms
- Spec Kit Agents: Context-Grounded Agentic Workflows — the source that introduces the term and proposes context-grounding hooks against it
- Spec-driven development — the practice whose staged workflow this failure mode survives
- Context engineering — the broader concern with what an agent is given to work from