The Context Window

The fixed number of tokens a model can attend to in one call. Everything the model knows in that moment is inside it; everything else does not exist.

Why it matters in a memory layer

The window is a budget, not a memory. Enlarging it does not add selection, persistence, or the ability to change a belief — it only makes the same unsolved problems more expensive. Attention also degrades over long spans, so a fact buried mid-window is present but not necessarily used.

Connections

Taught in: Context Is Not Memory

Do not confuse with: Working Memory