How much of a long tool log should an agent keep in context? A real engineering trade-off
Ctbhatia · reddit · 2026-10-14
A Reddit discussion on agent engineering: how much of a long test log should stay in context? The poster is torn between not letting the agent forget what it's doing and not dragging every line of tool output along forever.
- The awkward trade-off: A summary can look tidy yet drop the exact error or file path needed for the next step; smaller context isn't automatically better, and the agent still needs to know why the last attempt failed.
- Options floated: trim old tool output, summarize it, or keep the full log somewhere the agent can re-read.
No definitive answer yet, but a real, common tension for anyone building agent memory/context management.
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