Mask, Don’t Muse: When Simple Memory Beats Fancy Summaries
TL;DR for operators A coding agent’s memory problem is not philosophical. It is a bill. The paper behind this article compares three ways to manage context in software-engineering agents: keep the full trajectory, summarize old turns with an LLM, or simply mask older environment observations while preserving the agent’s reasoning and actions.1 Across five SWE-agent configurations on SWE-bench Verified, both context-management strategies usually cut cost sharply versus the Raw Agent. The awkward part is that the simple strategy, Observation Masking, is often just as good as LLM-Summary on solve rate and usually cheaper. ...