Context as the Agent’s Eyes

Context is all the information the agent sees at each decision point: system prompt, tool definitions, dialogue history, tool results, memory, and state. The context window is the agent’s “field of view”—the model only makes decisions based on what it sees. Ablation studies show that removing any component of context noticeably degrades performance.

Related: [Five Components of Context], [ReAct Cycle], [Context Engineering]