Context Rot
The gradual loss of instruction-following quality as a conversation or agent trace fills with stale, noisy, or contradictory context.
Plain English
Too much leftover chat junk makes the model forget what actually matters.
Example
After dozens of tool results, an agent ignores the original acceptance criteria buried near the top of the thread.
Why it matters
Long-running agents need compaction, resets, and memory design, not just a bigger context window.