When I ask for Patterns, I am seeking help for recurring problems that I have encountered. Context management .. small llms ( ones with small context size) break and get confused and forget work they have done or the original goal.
That's why you want to use sub-agents which handle smaller tasks and return results to a delegating agent. So all agents have their own very specialized context window.
That's one legit answer. But if you're not stuck in Claude's context model, you can do other things. One extremely stupid simple thing you can do, which is very handy when you're doing large-scale data processing (like log analysis): just don't save the bulky tool responses in your context window once the LLM has generated a real response to them.
My own dumb TUI agent, I gave a built in `lobotomize` tool, which dumps a text list of everything in the context window (short summary text plus token count), and then lets it Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Agent things out of the window. It works! The models know how to drive that tool. It'll do a series of giant ass log queries, filling up the context window, and then you can watch as it zaps things out of the window to make space for more queries.
zahlman|3 months ago
Design patterns can't help you here. The hard part is figuring out what to do; the "how" is trivial.
skeledrew|3 months ago
tptacek|3 months ago
My own dumb TUI agent, I gave a built in `lobotomize` tool, which dumps a text list of everything in the context window (short summary text plus token count), and then lets it Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Agent things out of the window. It works! The models know how to drive that tool. It'll do a series of giant ass log queries, filling up the context window, and then you can watch as it zaps things out of the window to make space for more queries.
This is like 20 lines of code.