When the AI Runs Out of Room

Questions this answersQuestions this answersfaq

why does a long job get worse near the end?why does a long job get worse near the end?why does quality drop late in a long run?

Because the useful information is buried. By step ninety the run is carrying every result from steps one to eighty-nine, most of which stopped mattering ages ago, and the thing it actually needs is somewhere in the middle of all that. It is not tiredness. It is a desk nobody cleared.Because the useful information is buried. By step ninety the run is carrying every result from steps one to eighty-nine, most of which stopped mattering ages ago, and the thing it actually needs is somewhere in the middle of all that. It is not tiredness. It is a desk nobody cleared.Signal dilution before the hard limit. Every tool result stays in the turn list, so the ratio of relevant to stale context falls as the run proceeds, and retrieval from the middle of a long context is weaker than from either end. The hard failure at the window edge is the obvious symptom; the quiet one is degraded judgement for a long time before that.

which of the three should we pick?which of the three should we pick?clear, summarise, or write it down?

Ask whether step ninety needs to know what happened at step twelve. Usually it does not, and you clear. If the run is building something where the early decisions still matter, summarise instead. If the answer has to outlive the run entirely, write it down somewhere real.Ask whether step ninety needs to know what happened at step twelve. Usually it does not, and you clear. If the run is building something where the early decisions still matter, summarise instead. If the answer has to outlive the run entirely, write it down somewhere real.By whether early detail is still load-bearing. Independent per-item work clears safely, because item ninety does not depend on item twelve. Work that accumulates a decision needs compaction, which keeps the thread of reasoning in fewer tokens. Anything that must survive the session, or be read by a later run, belongs in a file or a row, not in the conversation.