Symbol c
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The decay is geometric, not linear: at c = 0.8 , five hops in sequence leave roughly a third of the original context standing, and ten hops leave roughly a tenth. This is a deliberately crude model — real handoffs do not lose a uniform fraction, and a well-designed handoff can pass a compact, engineered summary that preserves more decision-relevant content than a naive fraction would suggest — but the shape of the result is the real point. An architecture built from many shallow sequential handoffs loses information faster than the same total work done through fewer, deeper delegations, or through state passed explicitly rather than through whatever a conversational summary happens to…
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Equation 4 · AI Agents & Systems
Ten Failure Modes That Define Production AI Agent Architectures
This equation states an equality: the expressions on both sides have the same value under the article’s assumptions.
The decay is geometric, not linear: at c = 0.8 , five hops in sequence leave roughly a third of the original context standing, and ten hops leave roughly a tenth. This is a deliberately crude model — real handoffs do not lose a uniform fraction, and a well-designed handoff can pass a compact, engineered summary that preserves more decision-relevant content than a naive fraction would suggest — but the shape of the result is the real point. An architecture built from many shallow sequential handoffs loses information faster than the same total work done through fewer, deeper delegations, or through state passed explicitly rather than through whatever a conversational summary happens to…
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