6 PrepMint guides tagged context-window — written from using the tools and checked against the vendor's own documentation.
How it works · 9 min read
Every assistant offers the same five containers for an instruction, and the same sentence is a permanent rule in one and a single-turn suggestion in another. The placement rule across vendors: what survives a new conversation, what survives a context trim, what gets re-billed every turn, and what outranks what.
Limits and plans · 9 min read
Anthropic publishes the plan tiers; it does not publish what a limit is spent on. The meter runs on tokens rather than messages, a long chat re-sends itself every turn, and attachments, project knowledge, tool results and thinking all land in the same budget. Mechanism first, numbers last.
How it works · 10 min read
Indexing says synced, the file is open, and Cursor still answers as if your code does not exist. Follow one request end to end: what gets attached, what gets injected, what the agent decides to search for, what three ignore files remove, and what gets compressed away.
How it works · 9 min read
You changed nothing and the answer changed anyway. A mental model of what actually varies between two runs of an identical prompt: sampling that never fully stops, a context window that grows every turn, a system prompt the vendor rewrites, memory you cannot see, and infrastructure that moves under a pinned model.
Troubleshooting · 10 min read
The upload succeeded and the answer is about the wrong thing. Both vendors document the formats they accept; neither documents what happens between the upload and the model. Eight causes, each with a distinct fingerprint, and three probes that tell you what the model actually saw.
How it works · 9 min read
The docs specify how to define a subagent and never state what it inherits. A subagent starts on an empty context window, the delegation prompt is the only thing that crosses, and only its final message comes back — so it re-reads files you already read, and that is the feature working.