beginner
9 min read
Calculate an LLM Context Budget Step by Step
Your request worked yesterday. Today the answer stops mid-sentence, or the API returns an error, and you have no idea which of the four things you sent is…
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Context Management
How the information available to an LLM during a request is assembled, budgeted, retained, summarized, or limited.
Tagged articles
Context Management articles
14 articles in this tag.
intermediate
11 min read
Common LLM Agent Failures: Loops, Wrong Tools, and Lost Context
Your agent runs. It calls tools. It produces output. And yet, something is wrong—or it never stops running at all. The frustrating part is that you can't…
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beginner
13 min read
Conversation History Management: How LLM Apps Handle Long Chats
Your chat app seems to forget things. You mentioned a preference twenty messages ago, and now the assistant answers as if you never said it. It feels…
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beginner
11 min read
What to Learn Before LLM Frameworks: A First-Principles Path
Frameworks change. The model underneath them doesn't. Learn the mechanism first, and every new tool becomes just another wrapper around something you…
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intermediate
12 min read
LLM Agent Memory Explained: Context, Retrieval, and Stored State
You build an agent. You chat with it for a few turns. It helps you draft a plan, picks a tool, runs it, reports back. Then you ask: "What was the second…
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intermediate
14 min read
The LLM Application Request Lifecycle: From User Input to Verified Result
That single distinction separates a demo from a system. When you chat with an LLM directly, you are the pipeline: you judge the output, check the facts,…
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beginner
10 min read
LLM Context Windows Explained: What Models Can See at Once
You tell a chatbot your name early in a conversation. Twenty messages later, it uses your name correctly. It feels like the model has been paying attention…
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beginner
10 min read
LLM Message Roles and Context: How Instructions Are Organized
You type a question into a chat window, and the model answers. Simple enough. Then you open an API playground or peek at an app's developer docs, and…
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intermediate
8 min read
How Multimodal Inputs Use Model Capacity Beyond Text Tokens
You type a short question, attach one screenshot, and hit send. The words are maybe forty. The request behaves like it swallowed a page.
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intermediate
10 min read
Practice Choosing an Agent Memory Strategy for Each Task
The agent remembered everything and still gave the wrong answer. That is the failure this drill is built to prevent.
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intermediate
10 min read
RAG Chunking Math: Calculate Chunk Counts, Overlap, and Token Use
A 1,500-token document with 512-token chunks and 15% overlap quietly becomes four chunks, and the same paragraph now lives in two of them. Nobody chose…
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intermediate
12 min read
The RAG Pipeline Explained: From Documents to Grounded Answers
You know RAG retrieves documents and feeds them to a language model. But if someone asked you what actually happens between a source PDF and a grounded…
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beginner
10 min read
Test Conversation-History Strategies on a Fixed Task
A chat assistant repeats a detail from ten turns ago, then forgets the order number you gave it two turns ago. Nothing about the model changed between…
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beginner
7 min read
What Are LLM Tokens? A Beginner's Guide to Text Units
You paste a long document into a chatbot and hit an error about a "token limit." Or you open an API pricing page and see costs quoted per token, with no…
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