The State of Context Engineering

Drew Breunig's AGNTCon talk argues that each model capability creates a new context failure, while the fixes stay the same: augmentation, tool loadout, quarantine, pruning, offloading, summarization. His newest failure, "context inertia," is agents fixating on one idea in long runs. Anthropic's Memento harness clears context every 90 minutes while keeping the environment, and two other papers report similar gains. For builders, resetting context near 200,000 tokens is a cheap first fix. The METR task-length figures and the instruction-following results come without verified sources.