AI Kept Forgetting My Notes. Fixing That Taught Me How It Actually Works.

A simple, experience-driven breakdown of context windows, tokens, retrieval, hallucination, and why AI behaves the way it does. THE PROBLEM Three weeks into learning machine learning, I ran into a problem. Not with models or math, but with my notes. I had taken the time to write things in my own words, build analogies that made sense to me, and note down questions I wanted to revisit. The problem wasn’t quality. It was structure. My notes were scattered across different apps, formats, and styles. Some were in Notion, a few in Google Docs, and others buried in random text files.