Rethinking context management: Maybe conversation summaries are a bad idea now
awitod · reddit · 2026-08-30
Based on hands-on experience using Qwen 3.8 27b and Grok 4.6 for long-running coding tasks, the author questions the practice of compacting context with conversation summaries in long agent threads. Observing that Cursor's aggressive summarization seems to cause Grok to lose context and perform poorly on long tasks, while their own strategy—evicting old tool calls and only summarizing when necessary—allows the 27b model to maintain high performance at 272k context. The author suggests that strategies like RAG and compaction, designed for 16k-64k windows, might be obsolete with modern long-context capabilities.
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