Context Window
The maximum amount of text an AI model can 'see' and remember at once during a conversation.
01 Definition
The context window is the model's short-term memory — measured in tokens, it's the total amount of your conversation (your messages plus its replies plus any pasted documents) the model can consider at one time. Once you exceed it, the oldest parts get dropped or the model starts to forget them.
02 Why It Matters
If you're pasting a long document and the AI 'forgets' the beginning, you've likely hit the context window limit — this is why some tools handle huge files better than others.
03 Example
Claude's largest models support context windows of 200,000+ tokens, enough for a very long document.