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CONCEPT

Context Rot

The gradual degradation of a model's output quality as its context window fills with accumulated, partly irrelevant history: earlier instructions get diluted, contradictions creep in, and attention spreads thin. Motivates practices such as compaction, summarization, and starting fresh sessions to keep context dense and relevant.

Origin

Named in agent-tooling discussion for the quality decay seen as a context window fills with accumulated, stale history.

definition
Performance degradation as context grows, attention diluted across too many tokens
nature
Judgment degradation as the context window fills up

Fiches (3)