Lesson 1090 of 1455
Context Window Discipline: What Fits in AI's Memory
Pasting a 50-page document plus your question often gets a worse answer than pasting just the relevant 2 pages.
Builders · Prompting · ~10 min read
The big idea
Models have a 'context window' — how much text they can read at once. Modern Claude and GPT can hold 200k+ tokens, but performance degrades the more junk is in there. Curating the context (only what matters) beats dumping everything in.
Some examples
- You paste a whole textbook to ask one question — Claude misses the answer that was on page 4.
- You paste only chapters 3 and 4 — Claude nails it.
- You include 10 PDFs of documentation — the model gets confused which one matters.
- You include only the 1 PDF that's relevant + a clear question — the model is sharp.
Try it!
Take a long document and a question about it. First, ask with the whole doc. Then, ask with only the section you think is relevant. Compare quality.
Key terms in this lesson
Key terms in this lesson
End-of-lesson quiz
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