Equation 7 · What Actually Happens Inside a Very Long Claude Context Window
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Symbol O
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superscript
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Two. Hybrid retrieval-plus-long-context architectures, in the Self-Route style, become the default production pattern for large, heterogeneous document collections, with a full long-context pass reserved for queries a cheaper first pass flags as difficult, on the assumption that the cost asymmetry between O() and O() processing does not disappear as windows grow further. Disconfirmed if , by 2028, production systems handling large heterogeneous corpora have converged on feeding full context on every request as the standard approach, with no routing step.
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