A lot of AI agent workflows are becoming expensive for a very boring reason:
We keep giving the agent too much context and not enough direction.
The usual pattern looks like this:
Here is my whole repo. Here are 12 tools. Here are 9 docs. Here is the bug. Please figure it out.
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Sometimes it works.
But it is also how you end up with huge token usage, messy tool calls, slow runs, and an agent that spends half the session rediscovering what a human already knows.
More context feels safer.
In practice, it often makes the workflow worse.
The problem is not context.…