REFERENCE 03 / 14 · CORE CONCEPT · 3 MIN
Context rot
Even inside the budget, position matters — a fact buried mid-pile is often used worse than the same fact near an edge.
The toy above is the honest caveat to everything else in this library: even inside the budget, position matters — and so do the neighbors. In tested tasks, models often used information placed near an edge of the window better than the same information buried in the middle; the toy's second control shows the other half, the same fact losing its edge when the pages around it resemble it. Practitioners call the broader decay context rot — the longer and messier the window gets, the less reliably any single thing in it gets used.
Two working rules fall straight out:
- More context is not automatically better context. Dumping everything you have into the window feels thorough; in tested tasks it often made answers worse. Load what the task needs, where it can be seen.
- Long conversations rot. The thread that "got dumb" didn't get tired — its window filled with dead weight. Starting a fresh chat with a clean summary of where things stand beats pushing a rotten one forward.
Say it back in one line: why can a model miss a fact that is definitely in its window?