http://programmer.ie/tags/lost-in-the-middle/ Recent content in Lost in the Middle on Programmer.ie: Modern AI programming Hugo en-us Wed, 23 Sep 2026 05:00:05 +0100 http://programmer.ie/books/context/05-chapter/ Wed, 23 Sep 2026 05:00:05 +0100 http://programmer.ie/books/context/05-chapter/ <p>The seductive assumption runs like this. Useful information is good. The model has spare capacity. Therefore adding more potentially useful information should be better, or at worst harmless. Teams act on it constantly: the whole repository goes into the window just in case, every retrieved document is kept because retrieval must have returned it for a reason, history is never truncated because something old might matter. The budget chapter showed this costs money and headroom. This chapter shows it costs something more fundamental. Past a point, added context does not merely cost. It injures.</p>