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Context Window Budgeting

cognitive-interface-architecture / context-window-budgeting

Definition

The discipline of allocating limited context tokens between different categories of information: system prompt, task instructions, examples, retrieved content, and conversation history. What separates production-grade prompts from accidental ones. A budget-aware prompt reserves the highest-attention positions for the constraints that matter most.

What this prevents

When context fills without a budget, high-priority instructions get pushed to low-attention positions and are effectively ignored. The model is not disobeying; it never read that constraint at full weight.

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