Paperwork rot is the buildup of stale project documentation — task-tracker items nobody removed, session reports nobody reads, changelogs nobody curates — that accumulates in lockstep with a project's development activity until the paperwork stops reflecting reality.
Paperwork rot isn't caused by any single bad habit; it's what happens by default when documentation is treated as a write-once artifact instead of something with its own lifecycle. A task tracker that never removes completed items, a per-session report nobody deletes, a changelog nobody curates — each individually looks harmless, but the pile grows at the same rate as development activity, and eventually nobody can tell current state from history just by reading it. AI coding agents make this worse, not better, by default: agent-driven development can produce commits, PRs, and paperwork far faster than any human reviewer can manually prune, so "clean it up later" stops being a viable plan once agents are involved. 📝Keeping an AI-Agent Codebase Legible is the fix I run — cleanup tied to the event that makes an artifact stale (a PR opening, a release shipping) rather than a scheduled sweep, so the paperwork sheds itself instead of accumulating.
I coined this term while writing 📝The Git Agent Protocol — it's the failure mode that surprised me most once I was running several agents at once. The Git rules were mostly common sense once written down; the paperwork was the part that actually got away from me first.