What do you think context is, if not 'attention'?
Re:Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms
by chickensong on Sunday January 25, 2026 @10:31AM
(#46754916)
You can create a context that includes info and instructions, but the agent may not pay attention to everything in the context, even if context usage is low.
IMO "Attention" is an abstraction over the result of prompt engineering, the chain reaction of input converging the output (both "thinking" and response).
Re:Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms
by XenophileJKO on Sunday January 25, 2026 @02:31PM
(#46757354)
Context is the information you give the model, attention is what parts it focuses on.
And this is finite in capacity and emergent from the architecture.
However one of the bigger things is by having a focus on a specific task or a role, you force the LLM to "pay attention" to certain aspects. The models have finite attention and if you ask them to pay attention to "all things".. they just ignore some.
The act of forcing the model to pay attention can be acoomplished in alternative ways (defined process, commitee formation in single prompt, etc.), but defining personas at the sub-agent is one of the most efficient ways to encode a world view and responsibilities, vs explicitly listing them.