context-degradation

SKILL.md

Language models exhibit predictable degradation patterns as context length increases. Understanding these patterns is essential for diagnosing failures and designing resilient systems. Context degradation is not a binary state but a continuum of performance degradation that manifests in several distinct ways.

Context degradation manifests through several distinct patterns. The lost-in-middle phenomenon causes information in the center of context to receive less attention. Context poisoning occurs when errors compound through repeated reference. Context distraction happens when irrelevant information overwhelms relevant content. Context confusion arises when the model cannot determine which context applies. Context clas...

These patterns are predictable and can be mitigated through architectural patterns like compaction, masking, partitioning, and isolation.

Recognize, diagnose, and mitigate patterns of context degradation in agent systems. Use when context grows large, agent performance degrades unexpectedly, or debugging agent failures. Source: shipshitdev/library.

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