# Managing context in long-run agentic applications

DevFeed: [Managing context in long-run agentic applications](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/managing-context-in-long-run-agentic-applications-148.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://slack.engineering/managing-context-in-long-run-agentic-applications/>)

Author: Dominic Marks

Published: 2026-04-13T17:17:16Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [Engineering at Slack](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/engineering-at-slack.md>)

Topics: [long-context](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/long-context.md>), [context window](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/context-window.md>), [Artificial Intelligence](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/ai.md>), [Security](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/security.md>), [Architecture & Design](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/architecture-design.md>)

Tags: [agentic](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/agentic.md>), [agents](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/agents.md>), [ai-agents](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ai-agents.md>), [article](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/article.md>), [context-window](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/context-window.md>), [development](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/development.md>), [security](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/security.md>), [software-engineering](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/software-engineering.md>), [uncategorized](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/uncategorized.md>)

## AI overview

The article examines how long-running, multi-agent security investigations maintain coherent reasoning across many inference requests. It explains the limits of stateless language model APIs and finite context windows, then introduces three context channels: the Director's Journal, the Critic's Review, and the Critic's Timeline.

## Source excerpt

Excerpt In complex, long-running agentic systems, maintaining alignment and coherent reasoning between agents requires careful design. In this second article of our series, we explore these challenges and the mechanisms we built to keep teams of agents working productively over long time spans. We present a range of complementary techniques that balance the conflicting requirements...