Context management in large codebase exploration

What the exam expects

• Recognize context degradation in a long exploration session (inconsistent answers, "typical patterns" instead of the classes found earlier) and respond by persisting findings rather than by asking for more tokens.
• Have agents keep scratchpad and per-item state files that each new context window reads first.
• Delegate narrow, verbose investigations ("find all test files", "trace refund flow dependencies") to subagents while the main agent keeps the high-level plan.
• Summarize one exploration phase and inject that summary into the prompts of the next phase's subagents.
• Design crash recovery around structured state exports and a manifest the coordinator loads on resume.
• Use /compact with focus instructions, know what survives compaction, and keep generated or vendored code out of reads.

Key terms: context degradation (precision loss as the window fills); scratchpad file (notes on disk the agent rereads); state manifest (a structured record of done and pending work in a known location); compaction (replacing the conversation with a summary); Read deny rule (a permissions.deny entry that blocks file reads).

Key facts

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