Tiered Context Loading: Fit a Huge Agent Registry in Your Context Window
Pattern source: KARIMO (Apache-2.0)
It is late, the kind of late where you are doing back-of-the-envelope math on a system you were sure was fine, and the envelope keeps telling you it is not. The dispatcher had been happily picking the right agent for each incoming task. The fleet kept growing, more capabilities every week, and that was supposed to be a good thing. Then I actually multiplied two numbers I had never bothered to multiply, and the floor quietly dropped out. The router I had shipped could not, on paper, do the thing I was watching it do. It was only still standing because the registry had stayed small enough to hide the truth.
I had built it the way you build everything the first time, which is to say without imagining it ever getting big. Every time a task came in, I loaded every capability's full spec into context, let the model read all of it, and asked it to choose. Description, parameters, examples, edge cases, error modes, the whole document for every tool the system owned. It worked beautifully when I had a dozen capabilities. It worked fine at fifty. The trouble is that nothing in the code complains as you climb. There is no alarm at the moment it stops being affordable. It just keeps working right up until the arithmetic says it cannot, and you only find that wall if you go looking for it.
