Definition
Context Window
The maximum amount of text (measured in tokens) that a language model can process in a single interaction, including both input and output.
In Depth
The context window is one of the most important constraints in agent design. It determines how much information — conversation history, retrieved documents, tool results — the agent can consider at once. Modern models offer context windows from 8K to over 1M tokens, but longer contexts increase latency and cost. Effective agent architectures manage context strategically: summarizing old conversations, retrieving only relevant documents, and pruning unnecessary information to stay within useful context limits.
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