For the vast majority of models I've worked with, 150k tokens of context seems like some magic spot. If you can stay under it then the session will stay on track and the agent won't start getting forgetful and weird.

Just like with real work, it's valuable to break down big tasks into small tasks that you can knock over in a single session. When a session does start getting too big, you just need to ask the agent to reply with a comprehensive handover report and paste it into a new session.

For my quirky workflows I need 100K even to prep Opus 4.8 or higher to begin good work. Not programming, but a complex synthetic architecture for implementing more attentional autonomy for machines.