It is sound! The real context window is indeed smaller than the advertised marketing number. This gets interesting in verbose languages such as Java, where I've seen +16k tokens wasted on the classpath/import stanzas within a class. Yick.

The current series of prompts I'm using is somewhat 'manually manage/allocate memory' of the LLM context window.

It starts with a PROMPT.md with this content.

```

create or update implementation_status.md with the implementation status

study /specs and implement what has not been implemented yet in /src

create property-based tests inline in the source file that is being implemented

run "make" to verify the implementation after each change

```

If it goes off the rails (and it does) - restart the chat and use this.

```

@prompt

continue

```

None of this works without applying /stdlib to control the technical outcomes/patterns to steer the LLM. Otherwise you just get slop.