The Room Is Finite
Last timeAsking for a Shape
Instructions, examples, retrieved material and the answer itself all compete for the same space. A budget decides what goes in and, more usefully, what goes first.
The budget itself
Write down the parts and subtract. The preamble and the rules. The examples.
The conversation so far, if there is one. The retrieved passages. And the space
the answer will occupy, which comes out of the same pool.
- the total room
- the fixed parts, preamble and examples
- room reserved for the answer
- the length of one passage
- passages that fit
Two remarks about the total. The advertised size of a context window is not the
useful size, because quality falls off well before the limit and cost rises
with every token. And the budget should be set at a number you choose rather
than at the window size, so that running out is a decision rather than an error.
What competes for the room
The parts do not buy the same amount per token, and the differences are large
enough that guessing is a mistake.
The lesson stops here
5 more paragraphs to go
You have read the opening. The rest of the argument, the problems that check whether it landed, and the lines worth keeping at the end all come with a plan.
The first lesson of every course in the library reads the whole way through, free, so you can see exactly what the rest of them are.
See the planThe contentsThis is the reading half
Starting the course gives you your own copy of it. Every idea on every page has problems standing under it, marked with a reason rather than a tick, and any sentence you do not believe can be opened and argued with. None of that can happen on a page nobody owns.
The contents