context-degradation

1# Context Degradation Patterns
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3Diagnose and fix context failures before they cascade. Context degradation is not binary — it is a continuum that manifests through five distinct, predictable patterns: lost-in-middle, poisoning, distraction, confusion, and clash. Each pattern has specific detection signals and mitigation strategies. Treat degradation as an engineering problem with measurable thresholds, not an unpredictable failure mode.
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5## When to Activate
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7Activate this skill when:
8- Agent performance degrades unexpectedly during long conversations
9- Debugging cases where agents produce incorrect or irrelevant outputs
10- Designing systems that must handle large contexts reliably
11- Evaluating context engineering choices for production systems
12- Investigating "lost in middle" phenomena in agent outputs
13- Analyzing context-related failures in agent behavior
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15Do not activate this skill for adjacent work owned by other skills:
16- Explaining foundational context mechanics without an active failure: `context-fundamentals`.
17- Applying token-efficiency tactics after the failure pattern is known: `context-optimization`.
18- Designing a compression or handoff summary strategy: `context-compression`.
19- Persisting large outputs, logs, or scratch state outside the prompt: `filesystem-context`.
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21## Core Concepts
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