Editing Tokenization & Context Windows (section)

== Why this matters for your work ==

'''Long conversations degrade.''' If you've noticed AI giving worse answers later in a conversation than at the beginning, this is why. As the context window fills up, the model has more text to process and older information gets less "attention." Starting a fresh conversation for a new topic isn't a sign of failure — it's good practice.

'''Uploaded documents have limits.''' When you upload a PDF or paste a long document, it consumes context window space. A 50-page report might use 20,000+ tokens, leaving less room for your actual questions and the AI's responses. If you're working with long documents, consider summarizing or extracting the relevant sections first.

'''"AI forgot what I said" is usually a context issue.''' AI doesn't have memory between conversations (unless you're using features like Claude's Projects or custom GPTs that provide persistent context). Even within a conversation, if you're 30 messages in, the AI may lose track of something you said at the beginning because it's being pushed out of the active window.

'''This is why the [[The Handoff Protocol|Handoff Protocol]] exercise matters.''' When you learn to structure handoffs between AI sessions — summarizing context, carrying forward the essential information — you're working around context window limits intelligently.