Agentic Development · Memory & State
The maximum amount of text (measured in tokens) an LLM can process in a single call. Everything the agent knows about the current task must fit inside this window.
Example: If an agent's context window is 128k tokens and a codebase has 200k tokens, it can't read the whole codebase at once — it must select relevant files.
In practice: Managing the context window is one of the core engineering challenges in agentic systems. Long tasks require strategies like summarization, retrieval, or sliding windows to avoid losing important state.