Getting the Most Out of Claude's 1 Million Token Context Window

A million-token context window sounds like it solves the "forgetting" problem outright, but in practice how you organize that context still matters. When pasting a large codebase or document set into Claude, put the most important reference material — style guides, architecture docs, the specific files you're actively editing — toward the end of the prompt, closest to your actual question. Models generally attend most reliably to the beginning and end of very long contexts, so burying your real ask in the middle of a huge dump can still produce weaker answers than a well-organized prompt a tenth of the size.

Claude Projects make this easier by letting you upload reference files once and reuse them across an entire conversation thread, rather than re-pasting them each time. For coding work, we've had good results giving Claude an entire repository plus a clear, narrow task ("trace how the `checkout` flow calls the payments API and list every file involved") rather than an open-ended one — the larger the context, the more a specific question helps the model prioritize what actually matters.