Individual skill

context-degradation

This skill should be used for diagnosing and mitigating context degradation: lost-in-middle failures, context poisoning, context clash, context confusion, attention-pattern issues, and agent performance degradation caused by accumulated or conflicting context.

skills/context-degradation/SKILL.md

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# Context Degradation Patterns

Diagnose 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.

## When to Activate

Activate this skill when:
- Agent performance degrades unexpectedly during long conversations
- Debugging cases where agents produce incorrect or irrelevant outputs
- Designing systems that must handle large contexts reliably
- Evaluating context engineering choices for production systems
- Investigating "lost in middle" phenomena in agent outputs
- Analyzing context-related failures in agent behavior
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