Context Degradation Patterns

Diagnose and fix context failures before they cascade. Context degradation is not binary — it is a continuum that manifests through five distinct, predictable patterns: lost-in-middle, poisoning, distraction, confusion, and clash. Each pattern has specific detection signals and mitigation strategies. Treat degradation as an engineering problem with measurable thresholds, not an unpredictable failure mode.

When to Activate

• Agent performance degrades unexpectedly during long conversations
• Debugging cases where agents produce incorrect or irrelevant outputs
• Designing systems that must handle large contexts reliably
• Evaluating context engineering choices for production systems
• Investigating "lost in middle" phenomena in agent outputs
• Analyzing context-related failures in agent behavior

Do not activate this skill for adjacent work owned by other skills:

• Explaining foundational context mechanics without an active failure: context-fundamentals.
• Applying token-efficiency tactics after the failure pattern is known: context-optimization.

Core Concepts