You are designing a multi-step Claude workflow where some steps must reason without seeing the...

Option C is the correct application of context isolation. A specialized step should receive the minimum relevant information required for its own task rather than inheriting an ever-growing global transcript. This improves signal-to-noise ratio, limits accidental cross-task influence, controls token usage, and makes individual components easier to evaluate.

Anthropic’s context-engineering guidance explicitly identifies multi-agent architectures as a technique for long-horizon work. Specialized subagents can operate with their own context windows and return condensed results to an orchestrating agent rather than exposing every agent to every intermediate detail. This architecture protects each reasoning process from irrelevant history while allowing the overall system to preserve necessary state.

Options A and D represent the opposite approach: indiscriminately loading the full prior history. Larger context is not automatically better; Anthropic warns that excessive context can introduce context pollution and degrade retrieval or attention to important information. B also fails because a single global prompt does not isolate state or tailor the information available to each processing stage.

Therefore, C best implements scoped reasoning boundaries. Relevant Claude Developer topics are multi-agent architecture, subagents, context isolation, context engineering, orchestration, and long-running workflow design.

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