The Four Moves: Reduce, Offload, Isolate, Retrieve

Once you accept that the goal is the minimal effective context, the question becomes practical: how do you actually keep the context window small and clean while the agent does a long, multi-step job? The "Context Engineering in Manus" notes group the answer into a few core strategies, and "Part 2" adds detail. This chapter explains each move in depth, using how the Manus agent actually does it.

Manus is worth using as the running example because it is a popular general-purpose consumer agent, and a typical Manus task uses around 50 tool calls. Each Manus session runs on its own cloud-based virtual machine, which gives the agent a real computer: a filesystem, tools to navigate it, and the ability to run shell commands in a sandbox. That detail matters, because having a computer is what makes most of these moves possible.