kristjansson parent
If it’s in the context window … it’s sitting around as plain text. I guess asking is easier than scrollback?
Indeed. OP, nothing is "in" an LLM's context window at rest. The old version of your file is just cached in whatever file stores your IDE's chat logs, and this is an expensive way of retrieving what's already on your computer.
I mean there is the chance it's on someone else's computer ^W^W^W^ the cloud, and his provider of choice doesn't offer easy access to deep scrollback ... which means this is only inefficient, not inefficient and pointless.
Technically it doesn't have to be since that part of the context window would have been in the KV cache and the inference provider could have thrown away the textual input.
possible - but KV caches are generally _much_ bigger than the source text and can be reproduced from the source text so it wouldn't make a lot of sense to throw it out