Context Engineering Inside the Harness: 4 Mechanisms That Beat Context Overflow and Goal Loss on Long-Horizon Tasks

An agent, in its simplest form, is an LLM calling tools in a loop. That loop works for short jobs. Give it a task that runs for an hour and 200 tool calls, and it breaks in 2 predictable ways. The AWS Samples design guide for autonomous cloud coding agents names them directly: shallow agents suffer from context overflow, get distracted (goal...