Context as the Agent’s Eyes
Context – all the information the agent sees at each decision-making point:
- system prompt;
- tool definitions;
- dialogue history;
- tool results;
- memory and state.
The context window is the agent’s “field of view”: the model makes decisions only based on what it sees.
Ablation studies show: removing any component of context noticeably degrades performance.
Related: Five Components of Context, ReAct Framework, Context Engineering