Comment by NiloCK

There's a little grain of salt with respect to context lengths: the number has grown, but performance seems to degrade with larger context windows.

Anecdote:

I often front-load a bunch of package.jsons from a monorepo when making tooling / CI focused changes. Even 10 or 20k tokens in, Claude says things like "we should look at the contents of somepackage/package.json to check the specifics of the `dev` script."

But its already in the context window! Given the reminder (not reloading it, just saying "its in there"), Claude makes the inference it needs for the immediate problem.

This seems to approximate a 'working memory' for the assistant or models themselves. Curious whether the model is imposing this on the assistant as part of its schema for simulating a thoughtful (but fallible) agent, or if the model itself has the limitation.