Context Degradation

This skill walks through five failure patterns: lost-in-middle (that U-curve attention problem where middle content gets ignored), poisoning (bad tool outputs contaminating everything downstream), distraction (irrelevant docs tanking performance even when correct info is present), confusion (mixing up constraints from different tasks), and clash (contradictory but valid sources). It's built around the insight that these aren't random failures but predictable engineering problems with specific detection signals. The placement strategies and filtering rules are directly applicable if you're building anything that needs to handle contexts over 4K tokens reliably.