An agent's context window is approaching its limit mid-task. Which strategy best preserves task continuity while staying within the token budget?
Answer: Apply hierarchical summarization: compress older context into summaries while keeping recent exchanges verbatim
Hierarchical summarization preserves task continuity by compressing older context into dense summaries while retaining verbatim recent exchanges and critical task state. This balances token budget with continuity. Truncating oldest messages loses potentially critical earlier context (instructions, constraints). Clearing and restarting loses all task state. Max_tokens controls completion length, not the context window size — it cannot extend the context limit.