Preserve Agent Context Coherence
preserve-agent-context-coherence
Summary
Mixing unrelated work pollutes the sessions attention, working-copy state, and handoff narrative. Keep each session and jj change focused on one purpose, splitting work when ownership, validation, or review decisions diverge.
Problem
Unrelated work pollutes the session's attention, working-copy state, and handoff narrative. Even with long context windows, the useful context for one task can become harder to find when the agent mixes separate goals in one thread or change.
Preferred Move
Keep a session and jj change focused on one coherent purpose. For unrelated questions, investigations, or edits, start a side session, side note, or fresh jj change instead of folding the new work into the current context.
Tradeoff
Small follow-ups that complete the same review unit should stay together. Split only when the new work has a different owner, validation path, or review decision.
Agent Instruction
Before accepting unrelated work into the current thread or change, decide whether it belongs in a
fresh context. If you split it, name the relationship and preserve the current change's purpose.Examples
Bad: the agent mixes a doc review, a Rust refactor, and a publication workflow in one change.
Updated docs, refactored parser ownership, and pushed main.
Good: the agent keeps the current chunk coherent and starts a new one for the next topic.
Finished the documentation pattern batch. Started a fresh jj change for coding-agent guidance.