Why Bigger Context Windows Won't Save Your Agent — Elizabeth Fuentes Leone, AWS
Larger context windows cause agent hallucination; context engineering is the real fix.
“context engineering is helping us create a better architecture for these agent programs”
An AWS practitioner argues that the 'infinite context window will solve everything' belief is a myth, because models suffer from an attention curve that causes them to forget middle-of-context information, leading to hallucinations in long-running agent sessions. The proposed alternative is context engineering — a discipline of selectively routing large data to external storage, compressing via summarization, and sharing context across agents rather than dumping everything into the window. This reframes a widespread assumption in agent system design and signals a maturing engineering practice around context management.