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40 XP

Lesson 2 · 11 min

Context budgeting and priority scoring

How to decide what earns space in the context window — priority scoring, slot allocation, and content triage.

Not all context is equal

Before you can manage a context window, you need a framework for deciding what matters. Content earns its place by being:

  1. Necessary — the model cannot answer correctly without it
  2. Current — stale information is as bad as no information
  3. Specific — general background knowledge the model already has is wasted tokens

A good heuristic: if the model would give the same answer without a piece of content, that content shouldn't be in the context.