Recursive Context Decomposition Pattern Overview
Large language models have finite context windows. As context length approaches these limits, performance degrades significantly—a phenomenon researchers call "context rot." The model's attention becomes diluted, relevant information gets lost in the noise, and reasoning accuracy drops. Traditional solutions like summarization or truncation often result in the loss of critical information.
Recursive Context Decomposition is a pattern designed to overcome this limitation. It enables language models to process inputs that far exceed their native context window by treating the prompt itself as an external environment to be programmatically explored. Rather than attempting to fit all information into a single context, the agent loads the full input as an accessible data structure and writes code to systematically examine, filter, and recursively query subsets of that data.
The core mechanism involves three components working together: a code execution enviro