Practical Techniques for Managing a Filling Context Window · 1/2
Summarize instead of discarding blindly
The most common technique is summarization: once older parts of the interaction are no longer needed at full detail, compress them into a compact recap that preserves the important conclusions and drops the raw blow-by-blow. Instead of keeping every intermediate tool call and observation from steps 1 through 20, the agent keeps a two-sentence summary of what happened in that range and the full detail of only the most recent steps.
This is not the same as deleting the old content outright. A summary still carries forward the information the agent is likely to need, it's just compressed. The skill is in what the summarization step chooses to preserve versus omit, and that choice is exactly where things go wrong if done carelessly.