Context Decay and Intent Preservation in Creative and Technical Workflows: The BRIEF.md Specification

Modern creative and technical work increasingly spans long time horizons, multiple tools, frequent interruptions, and AI-assisted workflows. While contemporary software excels at preserving project state (files, parameters, versions), it largely ignores the preservation of project-level intent: purpose, constraints, decisions, and rationale. This white paper introduces context decay, the systematic loss of project intent over time and across tools, and proposes a model of five distinct context types (identity, motivational, constraint, decision, relational) that decay at different rates. It analyses how AI-assisted workflows may accelerate this decay through what we term the context illusion, and presents BRIEF.md: a lightweight, open, human-readable context file for making project intent explicit and portable. BRIEF.md synthesises architectural decision records, project identity files, and domain-specific metadata into a hierarchically composable context artifact that applies across creative and technical domains. Novel contributions include hierarchical context composition through folder nesting, the application of decision records to creative work, explicit negative space documentation, intentional ambiguity tracking, and the framing of context decay as a first-class design concern. The context decay model and the effectiveness of BRIEF.md as an intervention are presented as proposed frameworks warranting empirical investigation. Accompanying specification and implementation guide are available in the linked repository.