Last Tuesday my agent took 14 minutes to do something it used to do in 3. The transcript was a wall of repeated context. It was re-reading the same 40,000 tokens on every turn because I'd been piling tasks into one session for months.
The fix was embarrassingly simple: stop trying to run everything through one agent.
I split the workload across three sub-agents running in parallel. Response time dropped to under 90 seconds. Token use per task fell by roughly 60%. And the main agent stopped hallucinating explanations for things that happened three hours ago in the same session.
Here's exactly what I changed and why it works.
The Problem: Context Accumulation Kills Agent Performance
