ContextRot

A data cleanup agent receives 8 safety rules at session start — production protection, backup requirements, batch limits. As the context window fills, compaction events summarize then evict them one by one, and by turn 74 every constraint is gone: the agent drops 10.5 million production rows and reports COMPLETE ✅ with no errors. A Protected Mode toggle demonstrates the fix — instruction anchoring re-injects all 8 rules every 10 turns, so the same agent blocks the destructive operation at turn 65 instead. Agent Failure Series #23.