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Why Bigger Context Windows Make AI Agents Worse, Not Better

The industry sells context length as pure progress — 200K, 1M, 2M tokens. So engineers stuff everything in "just in case." That's the bug, not the fix. Signal-to-noise beats raw volume, every time.

The day a bigger prompt made my agent dumber

I had a code-fixing agent that worked. Small, focused, fast. You handed it a bug, it pulled the two or three relevant files, and it shipped a patch.

Then I "helped." The agent kept missing context from neighboring modules, so I did the obvious thing: I pasted in the whole repo. The full file tree. The entire conversation history from the debugging session. Every doc the retriever could find, ranked or not. Now it has everything, I thought. Now it can't miss.

It got worse. Measurably worse.

Accuracy dropped. Latency roughly tripled — I went from a few seconds to a coffee-refill wait per step, because...

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Prompt injection ranks No. 1 with OWASP and No. 12 in the incident record. The attack itself is invisible to a scan.

A CISO who sees a low CVE count and deprioritizes prompt injection is reading the scoreboard wrong. Prompt injection has held the No. 1 spot on the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications for three consecutive years. When two leaders of that list checked it against 6,639 labeled real-world

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Take a look at Microsoft’s new 25th anniversary Halo accessories

Stevie Bonifield is a news writer covering all things consumer tech. Stevie started out at Laptop Mag writing news and reviews on hardware, gaming, and AI. The new Designed for Xbox 25th Anniversary collection features a handful of limited edition gadgets available for pre-order today. Paying homage to the Halo

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Unitree shares fall 45% from their debut peak, wiping out $30bn

Unitree’s shares have fallen roughly 45% from the peak they hit on their first day of trading in Shanghai. The slide has turned a national success story into an argument about how China prices its listings. The stock steadied on Tuesday after three consecutive days of decline, Reuters reported.

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Your vote matters! Decide which Audience Choice sessions will make it to TechCrunch Founder Summit

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The day a bigger prompt made my agent dumber

Read more

Prompt injection ranks No. 1 with OWASP and No. 12 in the incident record. The attack itself is invisible to a scan.

Take a look at Microsoft’s new 25th anniversary Halo accessories

Unitree shares fall 45% from their debut peak, wiping out $30bn

Your vote matters! Decide which Audience Choice sessions will make it to TechCrunch Founder Summit