context-window-management

name	context-window-management
description	Strategies for managing LLM context windows including
type	skill
created	2026-02-27T00:00:00.000Z
domain	productivity
category	developer-experience
risk	unknown
source	vibeship-spawner-skills (Apache 2.0)
tags	["skill","productivity","developer-experience","context","window","management"]

Context Window Management

Strategies for managing LLM context windows including summarization, trimming, routing, and avoiding context rot

Capabilities

• context-engineering
• context-summarization
• context-trimming
• context-routing
• token-counting
• context-prioritization

Prerequisites

• Knowledge: LLM fundamentals, Tokenization basics, Prompt engineering
• Skills_recommended: prompt-engineering

Scope

• Does_not_cover: RAG implementation details, Model fine-tuning, Embedding models
• Boundaries: Focus is context optimization, Covers strategies not specific implementations

Ecosystem

Primary_tools

• tiktoken - OpenAI's tokenizer for counting tokens
• LangChain - Framework with context management utilities
• Claude API - 200K+ context with caching support

Patterns

Tiered Context Strategy

Different strategies based on context size

When to use: Building any multi-turn conversation system

interface ContextTier { maxTokens: number; strategy: 'full' | 'summarize' | 'rag'; model: string; }

const TIERS: ContextTier[] = [ { maxTokens: 8000, strategy: 'full', model: 'claude-3-haiku' }, { maxTokens: 32000, strategy: 'full', model: 'claude-3-5-sonnet' }, { maxTokens: 100000, strategy: 'summarize', model: 'claude-3-5-sonnet' }, { maxTokens: Infinity, strategy: 'rag', model: 'claude-3-5-sonnet' } ];

async function selectStrategy(messages: Message[]): ContextTier { const tokens = await countTokens(messages);

for (const tier of TIERS) {
    if (tokens <= tier.maxTokens) {
        return tier;
    }
}
return TIERS[TIERS.length - 1];

}

async function prepareContext(messages: Message[]): PreparedContext { const tier = await selectStrategy(messages);

switch (tier.strategy) {
    case 'full':
        return { messages, model: tier.model };

    case 'summarize':
        const summary = await summarizeOldMessages(messages);
        return { messages: [summary, ...recentMessages(messages)], model: tier.model };

    case 'rag':
        const relevant = await retrieveRelevant(messages);
        return { messages: [...relevant, ...recentMessages(messages)], model: tier.model };
}

}

Serial Position Optimization

Place important content at start and end

When to use: Constructing prompts with significant context

// LLMs weight beginning and end more heavily // Structure prompts to leverage this