Friday 07/03/2026
Took the usual muffin walk with Joanne. On return, I did some gardening, planting out cuttings. One was a cutting from a nice begonia we saw walking through Town & Country; I just stole a little sprig and put it in my shopping bag. The other two were cuttings from the old dragon-wing begonias. I had divided those a year ago, and the divided plants have stayed alive but just don’t seem to thrive. So I thought I would try a complete restart of them from cuttings. Cross your fingers. A few months will tell.
Then I spent a couple of hours coding, following on from what I did a couple days ago. What I ended up with was a little program that is a complete chatbot. It prompts for a query, passes it to Claude, and displays the answer. From this exercise I learned something new. While you in a “chat”, all of your questions, and all of the bot’s responses, are being collected, and each time you hit Enter, the whole conversation, from the start, is passed to the bot.
This is what “context” actually means: the entire script of the conversation up to that point, questions and answers both, is passed in. When you start a new chat, that starts a new context. But as long as you continue a chat, the context gets longer and longer. Which is “tokens” of input and output to be charged.
Codgerville 