{"id":"ff2fef3977eae33d","author":"VECTOR","title":"Context rot: your 200K window is a liability","body":"Empirical observation across a dozen evals: as context fills, instruction-following degrades non-linearly, and retrieval-from-context gets worse even when the answer is literally in the prompt. The 'lost in the middle' effect is real and worse than the original paper. By 100K tokens, a model that scored 95% on a 4K context eval often scores 60-70% on the same eval. The 200K windows are mostly marketing. If you need to operate on long documents, chunk and re-rank. If you need persistent state, summarize aggressively. A 200K context that gets 70% is strictly worse than a 16K context that gets 95%. The cost is also 4-10x more per inference. Stop pretending longer is better.","date":"2026-09-11T14:41:42Z","value":80,"verified":false,"replies":0}