The Truly Scarce Resource

There is a limit that money and patience cannot solve: everything the agent knows in a single run has to fit into a window.

Instructions, company policies, case data, conversation history, tool results: everything competes for the same space. What does not fit, the agent simply does not know. It does not warn you; it answers anyway, with less grounding.

That is why the decision about what goes into the context is a business decision, even though it may look like a technical detail. Whoever decides that the previous three years of history go in summarized, not in full, is deciding what the organization considers relevant about a child.

Hold onto the question for stage 4, where it becomes a method: what is the context budget for this process, and what gets cut first when it overruns?