AI Agent Glossary · AI Coding Tools Glossary
Context window
The maximum number of tokens a model can attend to at once; it bounds how much of a codebase an agent can see without retrieval.
Frontier coding models offer 200k to 1M+ tokens, but large repositories exceed that and long contexts degrade attention and raise cost. Agents therefore search and read selectively rather than loading everything. Context management — what to include, when to summarise — is a major part of scaffold quality, and 'context rot' on long sessions is a common failure mode.