The Problem: Context Rot

Research shows LLM performance degrades significantly with accumulated context:

• 20-30% performance gap between focused and polluted prompts (Chroma, 2025)
• Degradation starts at ~16K tokens for older Claude models (Chroma, 2025); Anthropic reports noticeable degradation around 300-400K tokens on the 1M context window (task-dependent, not a fixed threshold)
• Failed attempts, error traces, and iteration history dilute attention

Instead of managing context within a session, you can restart with a fresh session per task while persisting state externally.