In many cases, it’s context management.
A few observations: - Tokens are not just limits. They’re attention competition. - Even before hitting the hard window limit, attention dilution happens. - Coding tasks degrade faster than chat because of dependency density and multi-representation juggling (diffs, logs, tests).
I started managing context deliberately: - Always write a contract - Chunk sessions by intent - Snapshot state and restart - Prefer on-demand CLI instead of preloading large MCP responses
It dramatically improved the stability of the agent.
Curious how others are handling context optimization.