The context window is the total number of tokens the model can attend to in one call, spanning the system prompt, tool definitions, the accumulated transcript and the response. Everything the agent knows in a given step is inside it, and everything else has to be fetched.

Context Window

Every token spent on a verbose tool result is a token unavailable to the reasoning that follows. Treating context as a budget rather than a container is the mental shift that separates agents that hold up over fifty turns from ones that degrade at fifteen.

Context Is a Zero-Sum Resource

A topic of the Building AI Agents course. Planned for 1.5 hours at Medium difficulty.

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

A category of the Building AI Agents course, covering 4 topics.

Memory, Retrieval and Context Engineering

The Context Window as a Budget

A topic of the Building AI Agents course. Planned for 2 hours at Medium difficulty.

Retrieval Augmented Generation for Agents

Short Term and Long Term Memory

A topic of the Building AI Agents course. Planned for 1.5 hours at Hard difficulty.

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