context-budget

# Context Budget More context is not better. Past a threshold, accuracy falls off a cliff (context rot). - **Don't dump whole files** — read the relevant function/section, not the 2000-line module. - **Summarize, don't accumulate** — replace a 200K-token transcript with a 4K recap of the load-bearing facts. - **Drop dead context** — once a sub-task is done, its detail leaves the window. Keep the decision, drop the trace. - **State on disk, not in context** — progress goes to a file the next turn re-reads, not into an ever-growing prompt. A bloated standing context (CLAUDE.md) taxes every single turn. Trim weekly. If the agent is confidently wrong, suspect the context before the model.