alt Hacker NewsAnecdotally (sample size == 1), I have observed that as my context grows longer, the model seems to get dumber. I'm not an advanced user with harnesses, etc.; I just use the chat interface, as that's all I can afford, but after a few turns the model (I'm talking frontier models here from OAI and Ant) seems to just do stupider things.
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joshheitzman • yesterday at 11:14 PM
Let's bump that sample size to 2. I've observed the same and that observation has heavily influenced the design of my coding agent harness.
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DeepSeek v4.1 flash seems to do this thing where it starts saying that we should wrap up the current work and start again "next session" (whatever that means), that the "context budget" is almost up, or some other wording I'm forgetting, as the context gets longer.
I've taken to just manually making it write a handoff file and clearing context completely. I'm pretty much manually compacting instead of my harness doing it. Feels weird, but it does work.