1.06
Chats, and starting fresh
A chat is one conversation, and everything said in it stays in it until you end it.
That holding space is the context window, and on the biggest models it takes up to a million tokens, your messages, its replies and every file it opened.
Be conscious of it, because as it fills the answers get worse.
The fuller the window, the more it tends to get confused, so a chat that was sharp and has gone vague is not the model having a bad day, it is a full chat.
How good the answers are
Sharp
Starting to drift
Vague, forgets the brief
Empty window
Compact here, or start a fresh chat
Full window
How full the context window is
So the aim is one chat for one specific thing.
Give it the context it needs for that thing and not much more, and start fresh when the thing changes.
We will go through all of this in much more detail as the course goes on.
A new chat
An hour in
Three commands manage it:
- /clear starts a new chat, empty, and you reach for it whenever you change subject, and always when it has started getting things slightly wrong that it was getting right an hour ago.
- /compact summarises everything so far and carries on with the summary, which buys room in a long chat without losing the thread.
- /context shows how full the chat is, if you want to see it rather than guess.
Ending a chat empties it.
Nothing carries over to the next one unless it is written in a file, which is why the folder is the memory and the chat is not, and stage four writes the first file into it.
Handing a chat over to a new one
When a chat is getting full and the job is not finished, ask it to write down where you have got to before you leave, then start fresh and paste that in.