Posts tagged "context-mgmt"

We hit a wave of 400s on Gemini 2.5 yesterday that turned out to be a useful kick. The short version is that in required tool-calling mode, Gemini 2.5 has trouble with the size of our test authoring agent's tool library, where Gemini 3.1 doesn't. The fix is to switch to a less strict mode, which is mostly what I'm doing — but it isn't a free flip. With required mode we've been quietly assuming the model always responds with a tool call, and the looser mode means it sometimes won't, which today would corrupt the generation session. So the fix carries its own risk that I have to handle deliberately.

The bigger thing is that the strictness of the tool-calling mode and the size of the tool library both have real costs, and they compound. Each new tool widens the state space the model has to compile in required mode, and it widens the assumptions our own session loop has to maintain. None of that was visible until yesterday — and it's easy to keep adding "just one more" tool, or to leave the mode set to required, when each addition feels small. I think we need to be more intentional about how we configure our agents — both which tools earn a slot, and what we're asking the model to commit to in return. Some of those tools could probably be lazy-loaded the way our skill instructions already are.

Many of us have been struggling with rate limits lately. I spent part of last weekend thinking about why, and realized something embarrassing: I was using the agent to fix merge conflicts and bump a CLI version into the execution engine. That's not what the agent is for. The honest reason I kept doing it — I had roughly 20 worktrees open and couldn't tell you where the code in terminal five actually lived.

I scaled back to four. Named wt1 through wt4, multi-purpose — I decide what each one is for. They share the same color across my terminal, Chrome tab groups, VSCode, and Finder. Each tab gets a Planner session for feature design, a Terminal for deterministic tasks, and one panel per repo.

I know sub-agents could do something similar. But this is more transparent to me — and a CLI task inside a UI session eats context window, while a UI session in a CLI shell doesn't have the right skills loaded. First day. Maybe it helps someone else too.