Blog
-
Context budgets for multi-turn conversations
History grows every turn until it crowds out everything else. Window policies, structured state extraction, and why agent loops overflow fastest.
-
Where in the prompt things should go
Position affects whether the model uses what you put there. A default layout, why instructions get repeated at the end, and what prompt caching constrains.
-
What to cut first when context overflows
A cut order for when the budget doesn't balance: which component gives up space first, why history usually loses to retrieval, and how to degrade visibly.
-
Counting tokens before you spend them
Why character-count estimates drift, what message formatting adds that you didn't count, and how to build a budget check that fails before the API does.
-
The context window is a budget
Five things compete for every request's window, including the answer. How to write down the allocation, and why the output reservation is the row people forget.