Microsoft: clearing chat history lets AI agents find better solutions

Microsoft researchers found autonomous agents get stuck in 'idea basins', local solution regions reinforced by their growing chat context. Their Fork-and-Flush method clears the chat history while keeping the workspace. It achieved up to 66 percent better results on the same compute budget.

Why it matters: It suggests long context can actively hurt agents by anchoring them to early ideas, not just cost more. That fits the recent findings that agent teams and long runs often add cost without gains, and points to cheap context-management tricks as a lever over bigger models.