Paste only the specific part of a long document that answers the question

You dropped a fifty-page contract straight into the prompt, and the answer came back wrong or half-finished.

Beginner to intermediateRead 5 minDoing: under an hour6 steps

▶ Start

What you'll have at the end

The same question answered correctly from a short excerpt instead of the whole document, checked against the full text

Before you start

You need

You have a script or service that answers questions from one long real document, a contract, a policy, a report, by calling an LLM, and pasting the whole document in has been giving you wrong or half-finished answers.

Not covered

Searching across a whole collection of separate documents to find which one has the answer is a different technique and isn't covered here.

Leans on

6 steps

Where to go next

Compact old turns before your context window overflows

go there when the problem is a chat history that keeps growing turn after turn, not one document you already have in hand

Checked 15 Aug 2026

Part of the Context Engineering cookbook