RCWT: Measuring Task-Budget Displacement from Coordination Content in LLM Calls

Multi-agent and memory-augmented LLM systems often place coordination content, shared state, prior discussion, tool outputs, summaries, and role instructions, inside the same finite prompt used for the current task.

This creates a practical allocation problem: every token spent on coordination is unavailable to task instructions or evidence when a call is assembled under a fixed context budget.

We introduce the Roundtable Context Window Test (RCWT), a controlled protocol for measuring this task-budget displacement effect.

RCWT varies coordination content while controlling total budget, position order, task family, and scoring.

In the main context-dependent recall task at $W=4096$, three commercial models remain near baseline through moderate overhead and then degrade sharply once residual reference evidence falls to a few hundred tokens.

Window-scaling summaries are consistent with a task-specific residual-budget interpretation rather than a fixed percentage threshold, but we treat this as descriptive evidence rather than a universal law.

To test whether the fixed-budget cliff persists when task evidence remains intact, we add an intact-task ablation: the full task/reference block is kept present while coordination tokens increase by expanding total prompt length.

In that setting, all tested calls return every scored field correctly across GPT-4.1-mini, Claude Haiku 4.5, and Gemini 2.5 Flash up to a 95\% coordination ratio.

This ablation narrows the claim: the main RCWT cliff is best read as task-budget displacement, not as proof that coordination volume alone causes semantic interference in the original open-ended task.

RCWT is therefore a measurement primitive for context-allocation budgeting, not a complete theory of multi-agent benefit or session-level coordination.