When a user's follow-up message in a thread is clearly about a different topic than the original session, the agent continues carrying forward stale context from earlier in the thread. This causes confused behavior where the agent mixes up the old task with the new one.
Current behavior
- Thread context accumulates across all messages in a thread regardless of topic shifts
- When a user pivots to a completely different request mid-thread, the agent blends old and new context together
- This leads to wrong assumptions, hallucinated connections between unrelated tasks, and incorrect actions
Example
A thread started with "create a new minor release, then self-update" and later pivoted to "improve the self-update skill" and then "create a PR with those skill changes." The agent carried forward release/update context into the skill-editing and PR-creation steps, causing confusion.
Gap
The agent needs a mechanism to detect when a new message represents a fundamentally different intent from the prior session, and either:
- Start a clean internal session (reset accumulated context) while staying in the same thread
- Prompt the user to confirm the topic shift before proceeding
- At minimum, deprioritize stale context that doesn't relate to the new request
This could involve intent-change detection heuristics, explicit session boundaries, or smarter context windowing that weighs recency and relevance over completeness.
Action taken on behalf of David Cramer.
When a user's follow-up message in a thread is clearly about a different topic than the original session, the agent continues carrying forward stale context from earlier in the thread. This causes confused behavior where the agent mixes up the old task with the new one.
Current behavior
Example
A thread started with "create a new minor release, then self-update" and later pivoted to "improve the self-update skill" and then "create a PR with those skill changes." The agent carried forward release/update context into the skill-editing and PR-creation steps, causing confusion.
Gap
The agent needs a mechanism to detect when a new message represents a fundamentally different intent from the prior session, and either:
This could involve intent-change detection heuristics, explicit session boundaries, or smarter context windowing that weighs recency and relevance over completeness.
Action taken on behalf of David Cramer.