AI by Hand ✍️

AI by Hand ✍️

Turn Budget

How many turns before the window fills

Prof. Tom Yeh's avatar
Prof. Tom Yeh
Aug 19, 2026
∙ Paid

Library › Context Problems

  1. The Context Window

  2. Window Occupancy

  3. Growth per Turn

  4. Remaining Space

  5. Turn Budget

  6. Retrieval Footprint

  7. Retrieval per Turn

  8. Search Rounds

  9. Window Sizing

  10. Truncation

  11. Compaction

  12. The Compaction Bill

  13. Compacted Retrieval

  14. The Compaction Threshold

  15. Verbatim Tail

  16. Stateless API

  17. Retrieval Cost

  18. Context Tax

  19. Quadratic Cost

  20. Cost Forecast

Every turn is the same block, so a part-full window is a countdown: divide the free space by what one turn costs and you know how many are left. Marking the blocks in is the slow way to the same answer, and worth doing once, because it shows what the division is counting. The block is not the same for every agent, though: one that answers briefly gets far more turns out of the same window than one that writes at length. Notice too that the last turn has to fit whole; half a turn is not a turn.

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