# What is Context Bloat?

The accumulation of low-signal tool-call output and stale history that fills an AI agent's context window with content it no longer needs.

Source: https://usewire.io/glossary/context-bloat/
Last updated: 2026-06-25

---

Context bloat is what makes long-running agents degrade well before they reach the context window limit: as raw tool results pile up, they dilute the model's attention and crowd out the instructions and state that still matter. It is a context engineering problem rather than a model one, and the fix is to summarize, clear, or offload tool output rather than reach for a bigger window.

## Related terms

- [context-rot](https://usewire.io/glossary/context-rot/)
- [context-window](https://usewire.io/glossary/context-window/)
- [context-offloading](https://usewire.io/glossary/context-offloading/)
- [agent-drift](https://usewire.io/glossary/agent-drift/)
- [context-engineering](https://usewire.io/glossary/context-engineering/)