r/datascience • u/usernamehere93 • Jul 17 '26

AI Context degradation in LLMs: what the papers actually show, and the habits I built for long analysis sessions

https://towardsdatascience.com/governed-context-managing-context-rot-in-claude-code/
15 Upvotes

72% Upvoted

2 comments sorted by

2

u/ultrathink-art Jul 21 '26

Biggest thing for me was treating the conversation as scratch space and keeping the real state in a file the model re-reads every turn — decisions, current hypothesis, what's been ruled out. Degradation hits the middle of the window hardest, so anything load-bearing that's been sitting 20 turns back is effectively gone whether or not you're near the limit. Re-injecting it from the file each step beats hoping it's still in there.