lost in the middle

The observation that models attend best to the start and end of a long context and can skim what is buried in the middle. Put the important thing where it will be read.

ai 1 video 2 mentions also: context rot, needle in a haystack

Where it comes up

Cursor for Sales Engineers

Nov 12, 2025first said at 49:142 mentions

“I would finish one task and then start a totally unrelated task on that same chat window. or maybe I would go off on a tangent and try and solve something and then come back to my original topic. That causes what's called context rot uh whi…”