Clearing chat history helps AI agents find better solutions

What happened

Microsoft researchers found that autonomous AI agents (AI that carries out multi-step tasks rather than answering one question) get trapped in what they call "idea basins" because of their growing chat context, local solution regions they can't escape. Plus AI research Copy the url to clipboard Share this article Go to comment section Clearing chat history helps AI agents find better solutions Matthias Bastian View the LinkedIn Profile of Matthias Bastian Oct 12, 2026 Nano Banana Pro prompted by THE DECODER Long-running AI research agents can plateau despite additional compute, a Microsoft Research study finds. Microsoft is a software and software development company based in Redmond.

Microsoft researchers studied what they call "Autoresearch agents," AI systems that repeatedly propose solutions, evaluate them, and refine them based on feedback. Their "Fork-and-Flush" method clears the chat history but keeps the workspace, achieving up to 66 percent better results on the same compute budget.

The article Clearing chat history helps AI agents find better solutions appeared first on The Decoder . Accumulated conversation context can constrain their search, keeping them focused on similar solutions instead of exploring better approaches.

Eight independent runs of the same agent on the same task plateaued at significantly different performance levels, with final scores ranging from 68.3 to 100.0. These gaps persisted even with substantially more compute, according to the paper. Solutions from a single run almost always stayed within a small region of the map.

Key facts

• Microsoft researchers — found: that autonomous AI agents get trapped in what they call "idea basins" because of their growing chat context, local solution regions they can't escape