Context degradation is a real problem with all frontier LLMs. As a rule of thumb I try to never exceed 50% of available context window when working with either Claude Sonnet 4 or GPT-5 since the quality drops really fast from there.
Context degradation is a real problem with all frontier LLMs. As a rule of thumb I try to never exceed 50% of available context window when working with either Claude Sonnet 4 or GPT-5 since the quality drops really fast from there.
Agreed, and judicious use of subagents to prevent pollution of the main thread is another good mitigant.
I cap my context at 50k tokens.
I've never seen that level of extreme degradation (just making a small random change and repeating the same next steps infinitely) on Claude Code. Maybe Claude Code is more aggressive about auto compaction. I don't think Codex even compacts without /compact.
I think some of it is not necessarily auto compaction but the tooling built in. For example claude code itself very frequently builds in to remind the model what its working on and should be doing which helps always keeps its tasks in the most recent context, and overall has some pretty serious thought put into its system prompt and tooling.
But they have suffered quite a lot of degradation and quality issues recently.
To be honest unless Anthropic does something very impactful sometime soon I think they're losing their moat they had with developers as more and more jump to codex and other tools. They kind of massively threw their lead imo.
Yeah, I think you are right.