Context Window, explained
A context window is the maximum amount of text (measured in tokens) an AI can consider at one time, including your prompt, any documents, and its own answer.
Everything an AI is working with at a given moment, your instructions, the conversation so far, any files you pasted, and the answer it is writing, has to fit inside its context window. Think of it as the model's working memory: large, but finite.
When a conversation or document exceeds the window, the model loses access to the earliest parts. That is why a long chat can start to forget what you said at the beginning, or why a very large document may need to be summarized or split.
Modern models have big context windows, which is genuinely useful for working over long documents. But it is still a limit worth knowing, because it explains forgetting, shapes how you feed in large inputs, and affects cost.
Go deeper
Wield's AI Foundations track covers this hands-on, in plain English, with real examples and a copy-paste prompt to try it yourself.
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