There is a comfortable assumption behind a lot of context handling: the window has a ceiling, so anything up to that ceiling is fair game. Retrieve a few extra passages in case they help. Keep the whole conversation because trimming is work. Carry a generous system prompt because instructions feel safer when there are more of them. The window fits it…

A language model has no memory of you. It has no memory of the last thing it told you, no running notion of the task, no internal notebook that persists from one call to the next. What looks like memory is an illusion reconstructed on every request. The single place that illusion is assembled is the context window, and that window…