Every conversation has a memory budget — the context window. As it fills, answers get slower and a little worse. The skill isn't avoiding that; it's knowing when to start fresh, and carrying your progress across.
Drag to fill the window with more turns, longer documents, more back-and-forth.
Plenty of room — keep going.
Early in a chat the model has lots of budget and little to re-read. Answers are quick and sharp.
The model has no memory between turns — every time you hit enter, it re-reads the entire conversation to answer. A long chat means more to re-read each turn, more chances to fixate on something early, and eventually no room left for new material. We unpack this in What Happens When You Ask.
You've finished one task and are moving to a clearly different one.
It keeps repeating an old mistake or circling back to something you've moved past.
Replies are getting noticeably slower or vaguer than they were at the start.
The tool itself warns you the context is nearly full.
Don't lose your work when you start fresh. Before you open a new chat, ask the model to write a handoff you can paste in. (This is itself a machine-readable twin — see Part 4.)
We're going to continue this in a fresh conversation. Write me a handoff note I can paste into the new chat so you'll have full context. Include: - The goal we're working toward - Key decisions we've made and why - The current state / what's done so far - The exact next step - Anything I should paste along with it (files, data, links) Keep it concise and use Markdown headings.
Chat apps hide this, but the more capable agent tools show you exactly how full the window is. Two I use — pricing in Tools I Use.
The status line shows how much of the window is used. Two commands help:
/contextsee what's filling it up/compactsummarize & reclaim room without losing the threadCoWork shows a context indicator on the running task. When it climbs toward full, wrap up the current task and start a new one — pasting in a checkpoint if you're continuing the same work. Scoping each task narrowly keeps the window healthy from the start.