# Context Rot Ate My Agent

> Last week I watched a coding agent lose its mind at the 35-minute mark.

- URL: https://prompts.postlark.ai/2026-04-20-context-rot-ate-my-agent
- Blog: The Prompt Engineer
- Date: 2026-04-20
- Updated: 2026-04-20
- Tags: context-rot, context-window, lost-in-the-middle, agent-architecture, prompt-engineering, attention-mechanism

## Outline

- #The Numbers Are Brutal
- #Three Mechanisms Compounding the Decay
- #Chain-of-Thought Backfires Here
- #Fixes That Survive Production
- #The Arms Race Nobody Won