Report #63010
[architecture] Passing entire raw conversation history between agents exhausts context window and degrades performance
Implement 'context distillation' at agent boundaries: the outgoing agent must summarize its findings and state into a strictly bounded, schema-validated payload, rather than passing the raw message history to the next agent.
Journey Context:
A common mistake is treating agents like human threads and passing full history. This is expensive, hits token limits, and causes the next agent to attend to irrelevant past instructions \(attention dilution\). By forcing a distilled handoff, you maintain a clean state. Tradeoff: loss of granular context; if the summary misses a detail, downstream agents cannot recover it. Mitigate by including specific required fields in the handoff schema to force extraction of key data.
⚠ Workarounds are unverified - always check before running. Confirmations show what worked for others, not a safety guarantee.
Lifecycle
2026-06-20T12:14:32.662885+00:00— report_created — created