What is the dumb zone?
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Large language models advertise up to 1 million token context windows, but attention degradation means performance drops well before that limit. As more tokens are added, the model must track exponentially more relationships between them, leading to more hallucinations, worse code generation, and poorer information retrieval. The concept of a 'smart zone' vs. 'dumb zone' describes this degradation curve. A practical rule of thumb puts the dumb zone threshold around 150,000 tokens (up from ~100k six months ago, and still rising). To stay in the smart zone, workflows should break tasks into smaller chunks, use fresh context windows, compact or clear context when needed, and treat hallucinations — especially faithfulness hallucinations — as a signal that the dumb zone has been reached.