Applied AI: Tokens and Context Windows

Information in this post reflects publicly available sources as of October 18, 2026. Three things happen to the same engineer in one week. A 300-page contract pasted into a chat model is rejected as too long, even though the model advertises a "huge" context window. The monthly API bill reports 40 million tokens for what felt like a few thousand questions. And a frontier model, capable of explaining tax law, miscounts the letter r in &q… Read More