Why it matters
Elizabeth Fuentes Leone presents context management as selecting, compressing, isolating, and externalizing information. A practical example moves a large tool response into storage and returns a compact preview plus a reference; the agent retrieves only the needed evidence later. Strands documentation supplies an inspectable implementation with size thresholds, storage choices, targeted retrieval, and eviction behavior. This shifts the problem from fitting every result into a prompt to managing accessible, durable artifacts. Summaries and previews can omit decisive details, and a storage reference is useful only while its underlying content remains available to the authorized workflow.
My takeaway: Put the answer in the middle of a large synthetic tool result. Verify targeted retrieval finds it, then test an expired reference and a worker restart. Measure task accuracy and total retrieval cost alongside prompt size.