Glossary · Context Rot

Context Rot.

Why more context means worse answers.

Direct answer

Context rot is the measured degradation of model accuracy as input grows: every frontier model tested loses recall as windows fill, with semantic-matching tasks falling from 95%+ to 60–70% well before nominal limits. Attention is finite, each added token thins focus over everything already there, buries key facts mid-window (lost-in-the-middle), and raises cost on every subsequent turn. The defense is curation, not capacity: smallest high-signal token set per step.

In Anvaya

How We Implement It.

01Context RotAnvaya treats rot as the enemy: Prism + Quorum pack 2–4K tokens instead of ~50K raw, subagents isolate exploration, and output caps stop tool dumps from ever entering the window.

Questions

Asked About Context Rot.

Q

Does a 1M-token window fix context rot?

No, larger windows raise the ceiling but not attention quality. Rot is gradual, not a cliff; curation still wins at every size.

Q

How do I detect rot in my sessions?

Contradictions of earlier decisions, vague short answers, forgotten loaded files. Behavioral signal beats token counters.

Q

What is lost-in-the-middle?

Models attend most to window start and end; facts buried mid-context get used least reliably (Liu et al., 2023). Front-load decisions, repeat critical constraints at both ends.

Run Agents That Fit On Your Laptop.

25.6 MB median RSS. 25 agents ran in parallel on a Core 2 Duo with 4 GB RAM. Hundreds on your machine. Zero cloud required on the Ollama path.

Requires Rust/cargo to build from source. Linux and macOS today, Windows not yet supported. Pre-1.0, public beta. Pricing TBD.