Context: the desk, not a warehouse

Watch: context rot and the lost middle · 74 seconds · animated, sound on

The desk

The context window (explained in AI words, translated) is the model's working desk. Everything it can use has to be on that desk right now. It cannot reach into a drawer it does not have. Three things go wrong with it:

• Missing context. The fact it needs is not there, so it guesses. This is the classic hallucination.
• Stale context. A long conversation drifts. Old instructions and dead ends pile up, and the model starts blending them into its answers.
• Overstuffed context. Bury one important fact under fifty unimportant ones and the model can lose track of it.

Context rot

The overstuffing problem has hard numbers behind it. Chroma Research tested eighteen frontier models and found the same pattern in every one: as input grows, accuracy falls, and it starts falling long before the context window is full. Piling more into the prompt is not a free upgrade. Past a point, it is how you make a model worse.

The lost middle

Stranger still: models recall the edges of a long prompt best. A fact buried in the middle is the one most likely to be missed, so the answer to your question can depend on where in the pile the answer happens to sit. That result has held since 2023.

How Cronus keeps the desk deliberate

• Separate rooms. Each agent window is its own conversation with its own context. One job's leftovers cannot quietly poison another job's answer.
• Weaving on purpose. The Orchestra board lays conversations side by side and lets you move context between them deliberately, where you can see it.
• Asking instead of guessing. When your request is genuinely ambiguous, Cronus asks one clarifying question instead of picking a reading and running with it.

Sources: Hong, Troynikov, Huber, Context Rot, Chroma Research, 2025 · Liu et al., Lost in the Middle, 2023.