[manishsharan]

When I ask for Patterns, I am seeking help for recurring problems that I have encountered. Context management .. small llms ( ones with small context size) break and get confused and forget work they have done or the original goal.

[zahlman]

Start by thinking about how big the context window is, and what the rules should be for purging old context.

Design patterns can't help you here. The hard part is figuring out what to do; the "how" is trivial.

[skeledrew]

That's why you want to use sub-agents which handle smaller tasks and return results to a delegating agent. So all agents have their own very specialized context window.

[tptacek]

That's one legit answer. But if you're not stuck in Claude's context model, you can do other things. One extremely stupid simple thing you can do, which is very handy when you're doing large-scale data processing (like log analysis): just don't save the bulky tool responses in your context window once the LLM has generated a real response to them.

My own dumb TUI agent, I gave a built in `lobotomize` tool, which dumps a text list of everything in the context window (short summary text plus token count), and then lets it Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Agent things out of the window. It works! The models know how to drive that tool. It'll do a series of giant ass log queries, filling up the context window, and then you can watch as it zaps things out of the window to make space for more queries.

This is like 20 lines of code.

[adiasg]

Did something similar - added `summarize` and `restore` tools to maximize/minimize messages. Haven't gotten it to behave like I want. Hoping that some fiddling with the prompt will do it.

[lbotos]

FYI -- I vouched for you to undead this comment. It felt like a fine comment? I don't think you are shadowbanned but consider emailing the mods if you think you might me.