Agent Status String

The agent status string is a summary of dynamic metadata inserted at the end of the context: tool call counters, TODO progress, current time, environment state. Analogy: phone status bar. Theoretical basis: in-context learning is more like retrieval than reasoning – the model is good at finding but bad at aggregating itself. The status string should be maintained by code, not the LLM; it should cover all possible questions, otherwise it becomes a “false authority”; its accuracy is a first-order production metric. Saves strong models 80-90% of thinking tokens, raises accuracy of weak ones by tens of points.

Related: [Three Rules for KV Cache Friendliness], [Context Compression], [Dynamic Tool Loading]