More Context Isn't Better Context

Originally published at devopsdiary.blog. Post F-AID2 in the "Governing AI in the Enterprise" series.

The advice for the last two years has been simple: give the agent more. More tools. A bigger window. Another rules file. Half the talks at AI Dev 26 argued the reverse, and they brought data.

The pitch sounds right, which is why it spreads. If the agent gave a bad answer, it must have been missing something. So you connect another MCP server, paste in more docs, add a second CLAUDE.md. The output gets worse. Now you're debugging a system that has too much to read, not too little.

The four things people believe that aren't true

A Stripe engineer put up a slide listing four myths about feeding context to agents, and I'd repeated at least two of them out loud the month before.