AI article
Context engineering is cache management
Community description: A million token context window didn't make the long-running agent problem go away, it just moved it. The model still forgets what you told it an hour ago, only now it forgets after paying for it forty times. The techniques that work, compaction, retrieval, memory files, are the same ones we use to manage a cache.
Dev.to | Oct 6, 2026 | Ahmet Zeybek
Automated excerpt
I find it more useful to treat the context window as a cache. A model call is billed on input tokens, so once a conversation reaches 400,000 tokens, every turn costs 400,000 tokens, and an agent that takes sixty turns to finish a task has paid for that history sixty times. 1 The other is that the model doesn't use a long context evenly. At turn forty-four the agent modified a migration file.
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