The original title is 11 words: "Context rot: why your AI agent gets dumber the longer it runs"

Short summary

AI agents suffer 'context rot'—conversation history fills the context window with noise, degrading performance through attention recency bias, instruction dilution, and stale data. Three tested solutions: maintain a rolling window with compressed summary, extract explicit state, or restructure context. Test your system with instruction-following probes before implementing fixes.

• •Context rot degrades agent performance as history grows due to attention bias, instruction dilution, and stale state pollution
• •Measure rot with instruction-following compliance tests across varying conversation lengths
• •Fix with rolling-window + compression, explicit state extraction, or context restructuring patterns

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.