X-01Anatomy of a Context Window

Everything the model will ever know about this moment shares one finite window.

Key insight

Instructions, tools, memory, retrievals and history all compete for the same budget. Most of a mature agent’s window is spent on its own past actions and observations.

Failure mode

Treating the window as infinite until the day it isn’t: overflow behavior chosen by accident (truncation) instead of by design (compaction).

X-01Anatomy of a Context Window

Elsewhere in the atlas