A 1M context window is great – if you treat it as a tool, not a target. In practice, almost every long thread I’ve let bloat would have been better as two or three short, deliberate ones. The headroom isn’t there for you to fill – it’s there for the rare case when the work genuinely won’t fit. Last Tuesday I was 550K tokens into a thread about our skills builder when Claude proposed a fix I’d already tried, in the same chat, an hour earlier. I closed the tab, pasted five file paths and a six-line state.md into a fresh chat and asked the same question. The answer came back in half the time and was, if anything, better. Same model, same week, same work. Different desk. ...









