3 Things I Learned About Holding Context Through Long Debugging Sessions

You're four turns into debugging something with an LLM. The model just asked a clarifying question you answered two exchanges ago. You paste the error trace again. You repeat the code snippet. You restate the prior fix you attempted. The model has continuity. Your token bill does not. This is the cost of context collapse. And it's everywhere in production code. Thing 1: Context is expensive, and repetition is the silent killer Every time you re-paste the error trace, the stack trace, the code snippet, the prior fix attempt, you're paying for tokens you already paid for.