PROJECT TWO - ADDING CONTEXT MANAGEMENT

CHAPTER SUMMARY Chapter 66 taught the harness to keep its desk tidy. Long jobs cause context bloat and context rot, so the harness chooses what the model sees with a context builder. Compaction replaces old chatter with a summary while copying important decisions word for word. An external notes file records finished work so the agent can restart without redoing anything. A fair measurement changes one thing, uses the same tasks, and checks both cost and quality. In the lab, tidying the context cut the estimated tokens sent by roughly eighty percent in our test run while all twenty-five reports stayed identical. KEY TERMS REVIEW Context window: the amount of text a model can look at in one call. Context bloat: a conversation that has grown larger than it needs to be. Context rot: the loss of reliable attention as a long context grows. Context builder: code that chooses what the model sees on each call. Compaction: replacing old messages with a shorter summary. Important flag: a mark on a message meaning it must never be dropped. External notes: a file outside the conversation that records progress. Checkpoint: a saved point from which work can resume. Threshold: a limit that, once crossed, triggers an action such as compaction. Before and after comparison: a test of one change on the same tasks.