AI Techniques

Long Context

A model's ability to accept and reason over very large inputs — hundreds of thousands or millions of tokens — in a single request. Enables patterns like whole-codebase analysis or full-document review without chunking, though effective use still depends on prompt structure and retrieval quality.

Related terms

Prompt Caching
A provider-side optimization that reuses the KV cache for repeated prompt prefixes across requests, typically reducing input token cost by ~10× for reused content. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google offer it. Order-of-magnitude cost driver for RAG and agent workloads.

Also referenced: RAG, Large Language Model.

Framework dimensions

Free tools

Whitepapers

LLM Cost Optimization Patterns

Comparisons

RAG vs Fine-tuning vs Prompt Engineering: Decision Framework

Next steps

Take the assessment— See where you stand

Where this fits

Long Context is part of the AI Techniques vocabulary used in the Generative AI Maturity Framework. See the full glossary for the complete set of 149 defined terms, or take the free maturity assessment to see where your organisation stands.