Every time you send a message, the assistant re-reads the whole conversation before it replies: your messages, its own replies, and a description of every connector you've attached. All of that together is its context, and there's only so much room in it.
Connectors are useful, so it's tempting to switch them all on. The catch is that they aren't free. Each one takes up room and adds another tool the assistant has to choose between, whether or not you end up needing it. Past a certain point the answers get noticeably worse. That's what people mean by context rot.
What it looks like
You'll usually notice it in one of three ways.
The assistant picks the wrong connector. If four of the things you've attached can search something, it has to work out which one you meant. Sometimes it guesses wrong, and you get a confident answer drawn from the wrong place.
Your question gets less attention. Connector descriptions sit alongside your actual message and take up room. The same question asked with three connectors attached tends to get a sharper answer than one asked with twenty.
Replies get slower. All of it is re-read on every message, including in conversations where you never needed a connector at all.
Picking a good default set
Marking a connector on by default means it joins every new conversation automatically. It's worth doing for the two or three you reach for most days, and not really worth it for the rest.
If you're not sure, a decent test: would you bother attaching this by hand to a blank chat right now? If not, leave it off by default. It's still one click away from the + menu whenever you want it, and adding it halfway through a conversation works just as well.
If your default list gets long you'll see an amber note on the connectors page. Nothing is broken and you don't have to act on it. It's there as a nudge to have a look.
Group them with Projects instead
If a handful of connectors belong together for one piece of work, Projects are usually the better fit. A project keeps its own set of connectors, so the ones you use for research stay with your research and don't follow you into every other chat.
That way you get them when the work calls for them, and a clean slate everywhere else.
Where next
- Connectors: connecting connectors and attaching them in chat
- Projects: pin a set of connectors to one piece of work
- Chat: the conversation surface itself
