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 its context window accumulates stale state, abandoned hypotheses, and noisy intermediate results.
Also called: context fatigue
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
“People literally call it context rot: the model gets confused.”Episode 198 — The Model That Knows the Answer and Can't Say It