It's a fun, in the "style of the time" thing to track, but within a year or two, context window limitations won't be a thing.

Doubt me?

Think back 2 years. Now compare today. Change is at massive speed, and this issue is top line to be resolved in some fashion.

Gemini 1.5 Announced the 1 million token context window in 2024. I admire this view of being forward looking towards new technologies, specially when we see the history of how bad people can be at predictions just by looking at history HN posts/comments.

If we look at back 2 years, companies weren't investing into training their LLMs so heavily on code. Any code they got their hands on was what was in the LLMs training corpus, it's well known that the most recent improvements in LLM productivity occurred after they spent millions on different labs to produce more coding datasets for them.

So while LLMs have gotten a lot better at not needing the entire codebase in context at once, because their weights are already so well tuned to development environments they can better infer and index things as needed. However, I fail to see how the context window limitation would no longer be an issue since it's a fundamental part of the real world. Would we get better and more efficient ways of splitting and indexing context windows? Surely. Will that reduce our fear of soiling our contexts with bad prompt response cycles? Probably not...

I’m not so sure an increasingly large context window will be seen as a critical enabler (as it was viewed 6 months ago), after watching how amazingly effective subagents and tool calls are at tackling parts of the problem and surfacing the just the relevant bits for the task at hand. And if increasing the context window isn’t the current bottleneck, effort will be put elsewhere.