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epic: Context Engineering — reduce agent token costs while preserving task accuracy #659

Description

@OsherElhadad

Problem

LLM agents accumulate context quickly. A single long-running task can carry thousands of tokens of conversation history, tool outputs, intermediate reasoning, retrieved documents, repeated state, and superseded build/test runs — most of which the model does not need at each step. This drives four compounding costs:

  1. Direct token cost — every input token is billed; context grows across turns.
  2. Latency — larger requests take longer to prefill.
  3. Context-limit risk — long sessions eventually hit the model's context window ceiling.
  4. Quality risk — an oversized, noisy context can degrade the model's focus on what actually matters.

Goal

Apply context engineering transparently, at the infrastructure layer (AuthBridge / Kagenti sidecar), so that every agent running through the platform benefits automatically — without changes to agent code.

The objective is: reduce the token footprint of LLM requests as much as possible, with minimal impact on task accuracy.

Approach

A composable, provider-agnostic pipeline of context-reduction strategies intercepts LLM-bound requests. Reductions are either lossless or reversible — any dropped content can be recovered on demand. The pipeline is fail-open: any strategy that errors or grows the request is automatically reverted; the original is always a valid fallback.

Integration into Kagenti happens as an AuthBridge in-process plugin, applied transparently around LLM calls.

Scope of this epic

Track Description
Plugin integration AuthBridge context engineering plugin — see #641
Observability Expose per-request and aggregate savings metrics through AuthBridge's StatsSource
Configuration YAML-driven pipeline config, preset selection, per-strategy tuning, documentation
Evaluation Benchmark coverage confirming reward parity and token savings on Kagenti agent workloads

Success criteria

  • Measurable reduction in tokens billed per agent session.
  • Minimal reduction in accuracy.
  • No agent code changes required to benefit.
  • Plugin is configurable and observable.

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