Context Window Growth Is Shifting How Teams Design Long-Running Agent Tasks

## Memory Management Used to Be Mandatory When context windows were small, any agent task running longer than a few steps needed a separate memory-management layer -- summarizing, pruning, and re-injecting relevant history to stay within token limits. ## What Changes With More Room With substantially larger context windows now available, some teams are simplifying architectures for moderate-length tasks by simply keeping more raw history in context, skipping summarization logic that used to be required. ## Where Memory Management Still Matters For genuinely long-running or multi-day agent tasks, memory management remains necessary regardless of window size -- the shift is that it's no longer a default requirement for every agent, only for the subset of tasks that actually need it.