Context Reliability

Overview

Techniques to ensure Claude maintains accurate understanding of facts across long conversations, context window limits, and /compact operations. Covers the "lost in the middle" phenomenon, context preservation strategies, and scratchpad file patterns.

The "Lost in the Middle" Problem

Claude (and all LLMs) attend most strongly to the beginning and end of their context window. Information in the middle receives less attention, leading to missed facts and contradictions.

Mitigation: Bracket Critical Facts

Place the most important information at the START and END of your prompt: