A chat only grows but the context window is fixed — context management is choosing what survives

A context window is a hard token budget, and a conversation only ever grows. Left alone, every chat eventually crosses the limit and the request is rejected or silently truncated. Context management is the fix: before each request you token-budget the history and decide which turns to keep verbatim, which to drop, and which to compress. I built a small manager that runs in front of every model call. Here's how it works. Count tokens, not characters You can't budget what you can't measure, and…