Genesis
Context is a budget
It thinks only about what is in front of it, and the window is finite. What you include, and what you leave out, is the work.
The machine does not know things the way you do. It sees what fits in a finite window and reasons over exactly that; what you put in the window is, for this conversation, the whole world it inhabits. Fill it with the right material and answers sharpen. Fill it with noise, or let a long conversation silt up with dead ends and stale corrections, and quality degrades without anyone announcing it.
This turns inclusion into a skill. The relevant file beats a description of the file; the actual error beats a memory of it. And when a thread has drifted through three topics, the cheapest fix is usually a fresh session with a clean, deliberate briefing rather than one more message on top of the sediment.
How to practice it
Curate, don't accumulate.
Bring the artifact that matters and leave out the ones that don't. Ten relevant lines outweigh a pasted novel.
Watch for silting.
Abandoned approaches and superseded corrections stay in the window and keep steering. When answers turn vague, the window is full of the past.
Restart deliberately.
A fresh session with a two-paragraph brief beats a hundred-message thread. Write the handoff: goal, current state, constraints, next step.
Hand off between sessions.
Before closing a productive thread, ask for a context dump you can feed to the next one. The summary is the asset; the scrollback is not.