Yeah but it feels terrible. I put as much as I can into Claude skills and CLAUDE.md but the fact that this is something I even have to think about makes me sad. The discrete points where the context gets compacted really feel bad and not like how I think AGI or whatever should work.

Just continuously learn and have a super duper massive memory. Maybe I just need a bazillion GPUs to myself to get that.

But no-one wants to manage context all the time, it's incidental complexity.

I agree with essentially everything you said, except for the final claim that managing context is incidental complexity. From what I know of cognitive science, I would argue that context management is a central facet of intelligence, and a lot of the success of humans in society is dependent on their ability to do so. Looking at it from the other side, executive function disorders such as ADHD offer significant challenges for many humans, and they seem to be not quite entirely unlike these context issues that Claude faces.

no-one wants to manage context all the time

Maybe we'll start needing to have daily stand-ups with our coding agents.