Context windows in 2026
Huge context windows arrived. Cheap attention did not. What this means for real applications.
The good news
Documents that once needed chunking now fit whole. Retrieval quality matters less when everything fits — for prototypes.
Frequently asked questions
The catch
['Cost and latency scale with tokens, and models still attend unevenly to very long inputs. For production, retrieval plus focused context usually beats stuffing everything in.']