Attention Dilution: Why 1M-Token Context Windows Kill Strict Agent Behavior (And How We Fixed It)
There is a pervasive myth in modern AI engineering: “Just give the model a 1,000,000-token context window, paste all your enterprise governance rules in the system prompt, and let it build your system.” If you have built real-world autonomous coding agents operating inside complex cloud infrastructures, multi-module monorepos, or production Kubernetes clusters, you already know the harsh truth: massive context windows don’t make agents smarter; they make them amnesiac. As an agentic conversation unfolds—accumulating terminal outputs, stack traces, file diffs, and conversational turns—a subtle failure mode emerges: Attention Dilution. ...