7.1 — The context window: your critical resource
Claude Code's context window is its working memory. Every character you send, every file read, every response generated consumes tokens in that window. When it fills up, performance degrades measurably: Claude forgets instructions, loses precision, and produces lower-quality code.
Think of the context window like a computer's RAM. You wouldn't launch fifty applications on a machine with four gigs of RAM and expect smooth operation. It's exactly the same here. The context window is a finite resource, and this entire module revolves around one simple idea: manage it intelligently.
In practice, Claude Code displays your token consumption via the status line. The /cost command gives you a detai