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Wild WordAI Experience

context rot

Session quality decays as the window fills.

First Seen

2025

Context

Models don't process the 10,000th token as reliably as the 100th. Performance drops with distractors, with semantic distance from the question, and even on trivial copy-the-text tasks. The phenomenon drives 'context engineering' as a distinct discipline.

A wild word — documented from usage in the field, not coined by Xenolexica.

Understanding & Perception