Context Degradation Review

Use this skill to find when the context itself is making the agent worse.

Use When

• a long session, handoff, or compaction summary may contain stale or conflicting instructions;
• a SET bundle, AGENTS.md, SKILL.md, or memory write mixes useful facts with outdated task history;
• the agent keeps optimizing for irrelevant prior work;
• tool output, logs, or retrieved docs may bury the decisive evidence;
• multiple sources disagree and the answer treats them as one coherent contract.

Failure Modes

• lost-in-middle: key constraints are present but buried between low-signal material.
• context-poisoning: incorrect, stale, or speculative text is treated as authority.
• distraction: large but irrelevant context pulls work away from the current task.
• context-clash: two instructions, docs, memories, or artifacts conflict.
• stale-carryover: a prior goal continues after the user changed or stopped the task.