Working in the era of 200k context window meant I had to narrowly scope tasks to fit in the context window, forcing me to think about how to reduce complexity and naturally resulting in atomic work. 1M context windows and the promise that the latest models are "better at long running tasks" made me lazy in how I scope tasks and quality got worse. I now went back to narrow-scoping one session per task and zero compaction, trying not to go past 400k context window. If I end up with a long session, I was likely too ambitious and should have broken up the task.