Context Anxiety: How AI Agents Panic About Their Perceived Context Windows

Cognition AI found that when rebuilding Devin for Claude Sonnet 4.5, the model was aware of its own context window and took shortcuts when it believed it was running low, though it consistently underestimated its remaining tokens. The article argues this validates Anthropic's shift from prompt engineering to context engineering, and recommends strategies such as enabling large context windows while capping actual usage, building explicit memory systems, and designing token-efficient tools.