When to Use This Skill

Recognize patterns of context failure: lost-in-middle, poisoning, distraction, and clash

Use this skill when working with recognize patterns of context failure: lost-in-middle, poisoning, distraction, and clash.

Context Degradation Patterns

Language models exhibit predictable degradation patterns as context length increases. Understanding these patterns is essential for diagnosing failures and designing resilient systems. Context degradation is not a binary state but a continuum of performance degradation that manifests in several distinct ways.

When to Activate

Activate this skill when:

• 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