The book’s vocabulary

Context window

The limit on what one request can contain — not an unlimited archive.

From The World That Agrees With You2 sections of the book

The limit on how much information a single model request can contain: instructions, question, history, memory, sources, tool results, and the allowance for output and reasoning.

Large windows hold hundreds of thousands of tokens — some a million or more — but they are not an unlimited archive, and a large window is no guarantee that every relevant detail will be used correctly. When required evidence will not fit, the application should stop and say so rather than quietly drop it.

Definition from The World That Agrees With You: Understanding and Managing Sycophancy in the Age of AI, by Timothy O’Brien. © 2026 Timothy O’Brien. All rights reserved.

In the book

See also

  • Token
  • Memory compression