Glossary · term53 of 202
context poisoning
A failed attempt or wrong answer left sitting in a conversation keeps competing for attention on every later turn, dragging output back toward the same mistake even after correction.
also written as context poisoned · poisoned context
Related terms
/clearA Claude Code command that discards the current session's context entirely, used to start a fresh window after repeated corrections have polluted the old one.view termattention budgetThe fixed total of attention weight a model has to spend across a window, forced by softmax to sum to 1, so every added token draws share away from the others.view termcontext engineeringThe discipline of managing the full input a model sees, including system prompt, project files, tool output, and conversation history, rather than only the wording of one message.view termcontext rotMeasured accuracy decline as a model's input grows longer, even when the extra tokens are irrelevant, showing up well before the advertised context limit is reached.view termmulti-turn driftMeasured accuracy loss that occurs when the same task is spread across several conversational turns instead of arriving in one clean prompt, distinct from length-driven degradation alone.view term
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- first used
- jul 2026
