Context Modification as a Negative Alignment Tax

Context Rot Every LLM gets worse as its context grows. Chroma tested 18 frontier models and found performance degradation in all of them, often by double-digit percentages on tasks where short-context performance was strong. The industry calls this "context rot": the gradual degradation of response quality as irrelevant history accumulates in the context window. The standard fix is compaction: when the context gets too long, summarize it and throw away the original. Claude Code auto-compacts at ...