Lost in the Middle (The Agents Season, Episode 3)
From Linear Digressions by Katie Malone
May 4, 2026 · 20 min
About this episode
This episode explores how LLMs focus on the beginning and end of their context window, impacting AI agents' long-context reasoning.
Just like a memorable talk lives or dies by its opening and closing, LLMs have a surprisingly similar quirk: they pay close attention to what's at the beginning and end of their context window — and kind of zone out in the middle. This "lost in the middle" phenomenon has real consequences for anyone building AI agents that rely on long-context reasoning. In this episode we dig into the research behind how (and how poorly) models actually use the information you feed them, and what it means for the agentic systems we're all trying to build.
People in this episode
Host: Katie Malone
Topics covered
- LLMs
- AI agents
- long-context reasoning
- context window
- information processing
- research
Keywords
- LLMs
- context window
- AI agents
- long-context reasoning
- information processing
- research
Mentioned in this episode
Books & works: Lost in the Middle, The Agents Season
More episodes of Linear Digressions
- Many Agents, Many Problems (The Agents Season, Episode 8) · June 8, 2026 · 28 min
- How Do You Evaluate An AI Agent? (The Agents Season, Episode 7) · June 1, 2026 · 32 min
- AI Agent Failure Modes (The Agents Season, Episode 6) · May 25, 2026 · 33 min
- Agentic Planning (The Agents Season, Episode 5) · May 18, 2026 · 24 min
- Memory Management for AI Agents (The Agents Season, Episode 4) · May 10, 2026 · 25 min
- ReAct and Tool Usage (The Agents Season, Episode 2) · April 27, 2026 · 24 min
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