A bigger context window gave me a worse answer, repeatably
What you leave out of a context pack is a design decision, not waste.
context
10 posts
Your prompt is a config file, and it needs the same discipline
Untracked prompt edits are untracked behaviour changes.
Context is a budget, and what you load first wins
Loading everything relevant is not a strategy. Measure tokens per decision.
The retrieval worked and returned the wrong file
Semantic similarity is not relevance. A test file and its subject are near-identical in embedding space.
Where your AI coding bill actually goes: I measured one long session
22 articles and 110 generated assets in one session. What the retries cost, and the one change that cut attempts per asset from roughly 1.8 to 1.1.
Agent memory that is just files
Most questions an agent asks about past work are exact, not semantic. What a directory tree answers well, and the one query shape it cannot answer at all.
The context window is not your constraint — what you put in it is
Scoping a shared instruction bundle saved 8.2% per worker, against 40% guessed. Why residency beats capacity, and the surface that was never loaded at all.
Subagents are context isolation, not parallelism
Every dispatched worker pays a fixed setup cost before it does anything. Where the crossover sits, and why a ten-item batch ran faster serially.
One tool call can destroy your agent's context window
What a tool returns is a budget decision. Measured savings from scoping one payload, and why a thin result is more dangerous than a fat one.
Why every command runtime is capped at 200 lines
A 200-line cap on command runtimes, enforced by a hook. What it rejected, what that forced, and the one time the cap was the wrong tool.