managing-context-reliabilitylisted

# Managing Context and Reliability ## Overview Best-practice reference for the reliability layer: keeping context healthy over long sessions, escalating instead of guessing, propagating errors with structure, calibrating automation against human review, and preserving provenance. Each reference module states the correct pattern, the named anti-patterns, and ends with an **Audit Checklist** of verifiable conditions. ## When to use - Reviewing a long-running agent, a multi-agent pipeline's failure handling, or a synthesis/research system - Debugging: degrading answer quality over time, lost mid-context details, silently dropped errors, unattributed claims - Deciding: summarisation strategy, escalation criteria, sampling strategy for human review, when to trust automation Not for the loop/orchestration structure itself (use auditing-agent-architecture). ## Quick reference | Module | Read when the question is about | |---|---| | `references/5-1-context-window-management.md` | Summarisation traps, lost-in-the-middle, tool-result trimming, prompt caching | | `references/5-2-escalation-and-ambiguity-resolution.md` | Valid vs unreliable escalation triggers, explicit escalation criteria | | `references/5-3-error-propagation-in-multi-agent-systems.md` | Structured error context, coverage annotations, local recovery | | `references/5-4-codebase-exploration-and-context-degradation.md` | Scratchpads, subagent delegation, summary injection, `/compact`, crash recovery | | `references