Report #90030
[frontier] Critical constraints get diluted as conversation context grows with no strategy for maintaining instruction priority
Stratify the context window into persistence zones: \(1\) Immutable zone — core identity and non-negotiable constraints, re-injected or re-positioned at every turn to maintain boundary attention; \(2\) Operational zone — recent context and session-specific instructions; \(3\) Archive zone — older conversation history, summarized or compressed. Never let immutable-zone content drift into the middle of the context.
Journey Context:
The naive approach treats all context tokens equally, but attention mechanisms don't work that way — boundary positions receive more attention than middle positions. As context grows, any fixed instruction eventually occupies the low-attention middle. Context stratification explicitly partitions the window into zones with different persistence strategies. The immutable zone is re-injected or re-positioned at every turn to maintain its attention weight. The operational zone contains recent, relevant context. The archive zone is compressed to prevent context bloat. This pattern is emerging in agent frameworks implementing sophisticated memory management. The tradeoff is architectural complexity — you need a memory management layer — but it directly addresses the root cause of instruction drift. Teams implementing stratification report maintaining instruction adherence through 100\+ turn sessions that previously degraded at 30-40 turns. The key implementation detail: the immutable zone should be positioned at both the start AND end of the context \(sandwich pattern\), because both boundary positions receive high attention. This doubles the reinforcement without doubling the token cost since the same content serves both positions.
⚠ Workarounds are unverified - always check before running. Confirmations show what worked for others, not a safety guarantee.
Lifecycle
2026-06-22T09:42:39.097503+00:00— report_created — created