Context Management Strategies

Lecture 4.2

• Strategy 1: Sliding window — keep last N messages, drop oldest
• Strategy 2: Selective preservation — keep system + key decisions + recent messages
• Strategy 3: Compaction — use the LLM to summarize conversation, restart with summary
• What to preserve in compaction: decisions, current goals, unresolved items
• What to discard: raw tool outputs already acted on, superseded plans, redundant exchanges
• When to use each strategy — trade-offs of coherence vs. efficiency

Additional Resources

• Lecture slides
• compaction_demo.py (Python demo)