How agents hold information — and how to manage it

Duration: 35 min

Module goals

• Explain that at any moment the agent knows only what is in its “field of view”, and recognize three context problems: lost in the middle, context rot, distractors
• Separate context (stable background) from the prompt (the instruction for this request) and split them explicitly with headings or XML tags
• Choose where to store information: the project’s AGENTS.md (Claude Code imports it with the line @AGENTS.md in CLAUDE.md), the personal ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md, TODO.md, STATE.md, and tell them apart from MEMORY.md, which Claude writes itself
• Explain why a memory file must be short, and trim a bloated AGENTS.md
• Apply long-session techniques: a summary compression before a new session and parallel agents for independent subtasks

Units

When the agent didn't get you

Context vs Prompt

The memory system

Tune your memory

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checked against the course: 2026-11-02 · f2c72f9