@adlrocha - The Context Bootloader
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@adlrocha - The Context Bootloader<br>Or how to keep your agent’s context fresh as mint as they loop<br>adlrocha<br>Jul 26, 2026
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Back in January I wrote about my “Spec-Test-Lint” workflow and ended it with a small promise: I wanted to start tinkering with remote development environments. I was thinking then about setting something up that would let me run agents while I slept<br>Spoiler alert: I went down that route. It took me longer to write about what I ended up building, but this post is that update you deserved describing how my way of working with agents has changed since then (a time when the loop engineering term hadn’t been coined yet, and agents weren’t as cool and smart as now).<br>“But before you get into that, what was the infrastructure that you decided to build to run your agents?” Glad you asked. Nothing fancy. That Strix Halo-based device that I’ve been talking so much about? I promoted it into my remote development environment. All my agents and local models run there, and I use it from all of my devices on the same Tailscale network. This allows me to start some work from my workstation, continue from my laptop, and then ship it from my phone.<br>But let’s jump into what I wanted to talk about today.<br>Loading the right context at the right time
There’s a behaviour I’ve seen recurrently happening on my agent sessions. I ask an agent to make a decision or implement a feature in one of my repos, it gives me a confident answer, and the result is wrong. Not because the implementation itself is wrong or hallucinated, but because it was under-informed and it implemented the wrong thing. The document that had the answer was sitting in the same repository, four directories down, but nothing in the session told the agent to go and read it.<br>The instinct is to fix the issue with a better prompt. But I tried, and I can tell you that that instinct is wrong, inconsistent and error prone. You shouldn’t have to explicitly tell the agents where to look to get the right context (because we are humans, and we ourselves may forget), agents should be able to seamlessly find their way.<br>The other instinct is even worse: put everything in AGENTS.md. That has a name now, context cramming, and you end up with every lesson and convention and edge case in one enormous instructions file (like a constitution), with the model’s attention spread across it like a thin layer of butter. Garry Tan’s CLAUDE.md reached 20,000 lines before Claude Code itself told him to trim it down. The fix was a 200-line routing file that pointed at documents instead of containing them. That routing layer (that I’ve been using for half a year already on my Malone suite), is one instance of what I think is the right solution.<br>Dex Horthy, who (allegedly) coined “context engineering”, has a name for what happens when you overfill a context window: the dumb zone . Even models advertising a million tokens of context do good work up to roughly 300-400K, and smaller models fall over somewhere around 100K. Past that, in his words, they start doing “increasingly stupid things like deleting your .env file”. Attention is (generally) quadratic. Every irrelevant token you load is paid for twice, once in money and once in the model’s ability to think.<br>So loading context you don’t need isn’t just untidy. It actively makes the agent worse. That reframes the whole problem. The goal is to give the agent the right thing at the moment it needs it, not to give it everything. When I realised this, I found myself using /new in my agent sessions more and more and being more diligent about tracking and inspecting the context I was using.<br>The context bootloader
The pattern I landed on, and that now sits at the top of every AGENTS.md I write, is a context bootloader.<br>The idea is simple. The first thing the agent reads is not context, it’s a routing table. Given what the user just asked for, which expert or domain does this belong to, which manifest should you open, and what’s underneath that manifest. The agent descends only as far as the task requires. Most sessions touch two levels. Some touch three. Nothing loads the whole tree, because the whole tree is exactly what puts you in the dumb zone (don’t trust me, ask Garry and his Bible-length claude.md).<br>As mentioned above, the first place where I started using this routing approach was in malone-suite, my personal decision-making repo. Its AGENTS.md is 209 lines containing no domain knowledge at all: routing rules, a table of four experts, and the traversal contract . Each expert has a manifest of 40 to 55 lines listing what data files exist, what commands are available, and when you’d want the full ruleset. Only below that is there any actual content. A session about my portfolio never loads the newsletter context. A session about a post never loads the finance data.<br>And this is an architecture that I am starting to implement in all of my...