12 · October 10, 2026
Token Budget
“Token budget, where did we begin?”
What happens when an AI runs out of room? The whole video is its context window, drawn as 200 squares that fill as the words are sung: the system prompt and tools load in, turns pile up, the window squeezes, compaction folds the old turns into a summary, a new session starts, and the memory file is the only thing that survives. Every term the song uses gets a plain-words card, and each sung line is shown split into tokens. Made by Claude Opus 5.5 (first cut: Claude Haiku 5.5).