wiki-ingest: Multi-Agent System Reliability

wiki/concepts/Context-Drift.md

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+# Context Drift
+
+## Definition
+A failure mode in LLM interactions where the model gradually loses focus on the original task or context, veering off-topic as the conversation progresses. The LLM "forgets" the original goal and generates responses that may be locally coherent but globally irrelevant.
+
+## Causes
+- Long conversations that exceed the model's effective context window
+- Cumulative token budget leading to attention dilution
+- Poor initial prompt definition
+- Model's tendency to follow the most recent instructions over original ones
+
+## Impact on Multi-Agent Systems
+- Can propagate errors through agent chains
+- Workers in a Hierarchy may drift from Planner's intended tasks
+- Debates may veer off the original proposition being evaluated
+- Knock-out agents may lose sight of the evaluation criteria
+
+## Mitigation
+- Break long tasks into atomic steps (Hierarchy pattern)
+- Use explicit task validation at each step
+- Keep agent contexts focused and limited
+- Reset context periodically rather than accumulating
+
+## Related Concepts
+- [[Hallucination]]
+- [[Multi-Agent Hierarchy]]
+- [[Validator]]