Working with Contexts

What do human and artificial intelligence have in common? When they work too long, they mess up. Human intelligence loses focus. Artificial intelligence loses context:

“Overloading your context can cause your agents and applications to fail in surprising ways. Contexts can become poisoned, distracting, confusing, or conflicting. This is especially problematic for agents, which rely on context to gather information, synthesize findings, and coordinate actions.”

These are the typical problems encountered in context engineering:

• “Context poisoning is when a hallucination or other error makes it into the context, where it is repeatedly referenced.”
• “Context distraction is when a context grows so long that the model over-focuses on the context, neglecting what it learned during training.”
• “Context confusion is when superfluous content in the context is used by the model to generate a low-quality response.”
• “Context clash is when you accrue new information and tools in your context that conflicts with other information in the context.”

And these are the most promising solutions:

• “Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is the act of selectively adding relevant information to help the LLM generate a better response.”
• “Tool loadout is the act of selecting only relevant tool definitions to add to your context.”
• “Context quarantine is the act of isolating contexts in their own dedicated threads, each used separately by one or more LLMs.”
• “Context pruning is the act of removing irrelevant or otherwise unneeded information from the context.”
• “Context summarization is the act of boiling down an accrued context into a condensed summary.”

What your company needs is an Agentic AI Business Designer:

“Context management is usually the hardest part of building an agent. Programming the LLM to, as Karpathy says, “pack the context windows just right,” smartly deploying tools, information, and regular context maintenance, is the job of the agent designer.”

That’s why we’re making our workshop template for Multi-Agent System Design available free of charge on Miroverse:

👉 https://miro.com/miroverse/multiagent-system-mas-design-workshop/

You can learn more about context design, engineering, and management in the interesting article “Working with Contexts”:

 👉 https://www.oreilly.com/radar/working-with-contexts/