Applied AI

Course map · S1 How LLMs work · Episode 6 of 12

Context windows

S1 E6 Explainer · 16 slides · 3 October 2026

  1. Slide 1 of 16, Cover.
  2. Slide 2 of 16, Why it matters.
  3. Slide 3 of 16, Mental model.
  4. Slide 4 of 16, Concepts.
  5. Slide 5 of 16, Concepts.
  6. Slide 6 of 16, Data.
  7. Slide 7 of 16, Data.
  8. Slide 8 of 16, For engineers.
  9. Slide 9 of 16, Data.
  10. Slide 10 of 16, Data.
  11. Slide 11 of 16, Where it breaks.
  12. Slide 12 of 16, For engineers.
  13. Slide 13 of 16, In practice.
  14. Slide 14 of 16, For leaders.
  15. Slide 15 of 16, Decision rule.
  16. Slide 16 of 16, Series map.

Lesson notes

The context window is one shared budget for instructions, history, documents, and the answer, and what falls past its edge is often dropped without any error.

Decision rule

Treat the context window as a budget: count what you send, reserve room for the answer, and test at your real size.

Ideas in this lesson

  • Tokens
  • Statelessness
  • Context
  • Latency

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