Memory Is Not Context: Token Budgets, Narrative Relations, and Agent Economics
An agent answered a question about Infest with 2,326 tokens of memory in its final context. Getting to that answer required thirteen model calls and 19,831 input and output tokens. The verifier accepted it. One of its claims attributed evidence from the fourth song to the first. That execution contains the central problem of this study. A smaller context can conceal a more expensive decision process, and an accepted answer can conceal an unsupported interpretation. Neither becomes visible if the experiment ends at the final prompt or the aggregate score. ...