AI-powered features often behave perfectly during testing and quietly degrade in production. The model has not changed. The prompts have not changed. Latency looks normal. Error rates are clean. Yet the responses gradually feel off, slightly disconnected, missing nuance, referencing things that are no longer relevant to the task at hand.This pattern has a name: context rot. It does not throw exceptions. It does not appear in dashboards. It is one of the more subtle failure modes in production AI systems, and understanding it early makes a meaningful difference in the quality of what gets built.