Your conversation has a hard limit. Watch what happens when you hit it.
Every new page you lay down pushes the oldest page off the edge. That's the context window -- a hard limit on how much AI can hold in its mind at once. Your system prompt, your messages, and every word the AI says back? All sharing the same desk.
This is your AI's entire memory. Everything it knows about this conversation has to fit in here. Your system prompt just took the first 35 tokens.
The same conversation that overflows a small window might barely register in a larger one.
For long conversations: restart the chat when the AI starts ignoring your instructions -- it probably forgot them. Put your most important instructions at the beginning AND the end of your prompt. And remember, everything AI says back to you also fills the window.
The context window is finite, and the model's trained knowledge has gaps. So how do modern AI tools give answers grounded in your specific documents and data? Explore RAG →