Definition
Plain language
The drift and confusion that creeps in when an agent runs long enough to fill up its working memory.
As stated in the literature
Degradation of agent coherence as the context window accumulates stale state, abandoned hypotheses, and noisy intermediate results.
Also called: context rot
Why it matters: It's a leading reason today's agents stall on long tasks even when the underlying model is still capable of the work.
For example, after six hours of coding, an agent starts re-trying fixes it already rejected because its earlier reasoning is buried under thousands of intermediate tokens.
Heard on the show
“The authors have a phrase for this — context fatigue.”Episode 017 — When the Agent Grades Its Own Homework: A Brutal New Benchmark for AI Workers