02 / Sessions & Context
Context window
The hard limit on how much the model can see at once. It is the only window the model has onto the world: anything outside it does not exist, no matter how obvious it seems to you.
How you’ll hear it
“Can we just give it all our documents?”
“Not at once. There is a limit, and quality drops well before we reach it.”
Avoid
Treating a bigger context window as permission to include everything.
The longer version
The context window is the most the model can consider in one request. Windows have grown large, but a model does not attend equally to everything in a long context. Choosing the right material usually beats including all of it.