# What is Context Offloading?

The practice of keeping an AI agent's working context window small by moving state to an external destination, such as a file, a sub-agent, or a retrievable store, and bringing it back only when a step needs it.

Source: https://usewire.io/glossary/context-offloading/
Last updated: 2026-05-22

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Long-running agents accumulate conversation history, tool outputs, and observations that dilute attention and degrade accuracy. Context offloading patterns, including structured note-taking, sub-agent delegation, and just-in-time retrieval, relocate that bulk to a destination so the agent works with a small, high-signal window and can recover detail on demand. It differs from reduction techniques like compaction, which shrink the window in place rather than relocating anything.

## Related terms

- [context-window](https://usewire.io/glossary/context-window/)
- [context-compression](https://usewire.io/glossary/context-compression/)
- [context-rot](https://usewire.io/glossary/context-rot/)
- [context-engineering](https://usewire.io/glossary/context-engineering/)
- [multi-agent-system](https://usewire.io/glossary/multi-agent-system/)