YOUR SCENARIO
How would you approach this?
A travel-planning assistant exceeds its context budget after many revisions. A summary reduces tokens but forgets that the traveler cannot use stairs. How would you redesign the retained context?
This is an illustrative practice scenario. State any additional assumptions in your answer.
Make your case first.
Clarify the goal, identify the biggest uncertainty, outline an approach, and explain how you would test it. Spend about 8 minutes before opening the reference.
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Reveal reference approach Clarifying questions, decisions, and tradeoffs
Clarify before designing.
- Which facts are binding constraints, which were corrected, and which are historical discussion?
- Does the task need original evidence or just a current structured state?
One defensible approach
- 01
Separate state from narration
Store explicit current constraints, decisions, and unresolved questions in a scoped task record. Retain provenance and corrections. Use a conversational summary for background, not as the sole store of requirements that determine acceptable results.
- 02
Build a bounded prompt
Keep the current request, binding constraints, recent relevant turns, and targeted evidence. Budget tool results and output space as well as messages. Retrieve older detail when needed rather than keeping every previous itinerary in the active context.
- 03
Test retention under revision
Create long conversations with corrected preferences, distractors, and conflicting old plans. Check whether generated itineraries satisfy the latest constraints after compression. Compare token usage and task success on the same conversations.
Explain the tradeoff
Structured state takes more application work and can itself be wrong. Validate updates and retain enough provenance to inspect how a constraint entered the record.
Common mistakes
- Assuming a shorter summary is better because it costs less.
- Treating all earlier messages as equally authoritative.
KEEP THE CONVERSATION GOING
Try the follow-ups.
- How would a user correct an incorrectly stored constraint?
- Which original turns must remain recoverable?
Review your own answer.
Tick the points you covered. This is a reflection checklist, not an automated score or a hiring prediction.
Check the underlying concepts.
The scenario and reference approach were written for SaveMyToken. These sources support the technical concepts; they do not report this question being asked by an employer.
Anthropic: Effective context engineering for AI agents ↗LangChain: Short-term memory ↗