Originally written in French. Translated by AI — the meaning has been preserved, not the prose.
Short definition
A period of fixed duration, continuously recalculated, over which a user's consumption is added up to be compared with their limit.
Full definition
In the general sense of traffic control, a sliding window is a counter that isn't reset at a fixed hour: it progressively forgets the consumption that has left the period.
In the articles on this blog, the term designates Claude Code's five-hour window. Capacity frees up as the five hours elapse, with no reset time to wait for. What is consumed is therefore not a monthly budget but a number of runs possible in the hours ahead.
Usage in the field
Used to say why a skill's consumption is read in remaining runs rather than in spend, and why being blocked is felt as lost work.
Synonyms and variants
"rate limit", "5 h limit", "five-hour window".
Not to be confused with
- context window — the amount of text a model processes in a single request, bounded and ephemeral (see Context).
- monthly quota — an envelope reset on a fixed date, independent of the rhythm of use.
- Weighted cost — the unit consumption is counted in, where the sliding window is the period it is added up over.
Examples
A skill at 478,000 units saturating the limit in three or four runs, against eight to ten once optimized.
Ambiguities / debates
The word "window" designates, depending on your interlocutor, either the counting period or the model's capacity: the two meet in the same conversation about costs.