Your AI coding agent isn’t stupid

After using Cursor and Claude Code daily, I’ve noticed that when an AI coding agent drifts or forgets constraints, we assume it’s a model limitation. In many cases, it’s context management. A few observations: Tokens are not just limits. They’re attention competition. Even before hitting the hard window limit, attention dilution happens. Coding tasks degrade faster than chat because of dependency density and multi-representation juggling (diffs, logs, tests). I started managing context deliberately: Always write a contract Chunk sessions by intent Snapshot state and restart Prefer on-demand CLI instead of preloading large MCP responses It dramatically improved the stability of the agent. Curious how others are handling context optimization. I also wrote a detailed breakdown of: How tokens and context windows actually affect stability Why coding degrades faster A practical context stack model Why on-demand CLI retrieval is often more context-efficient Full post: https://codeaholicguy.co