# Context window

> The maximum amount of text a model can take into account at once, counting the instructions, the conversation and the answer together.

Everything the model considers has to fit in this one budget: the system prompt, any documents you retrieved, the whole conversation so far and the response it is about to write. When a long chat starts forgetting what was said at the beginning, the usual reason is that the beginning was dropped to make room.

Bigger windows have made a class of workarounds unnecessary, but not the discipline. Filling a large window with everything available costs money on every call, adds latency, and measurably degrades accuracy — models attend less reliably to material buried in the middle of a very long context. Sending the right five pages still beats sending all two hundred.

## Related terms

- https://dfieldsolutions.com/en/glossary/llm.md
- https://dfieldsolutions.com/en/glossary/rag.md
- https://dfieldsolutions.com/en/glossary/system-prompt.md

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Source: https://dfieldsolutions.com/en/glossary/context-window
DField Solutions — Dunakeszi, Hungary — dezso@dfieldsolutions.com
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