Context Engineering
FrontierTechniques and Architectures
Context engineering is the discipline of assembling the right information, tools and instructions into a model's context window before it acts. It is the successor to prompt engineering, because a prompt is a single instruction while an agent working through a long task needs the relevant documents retrieved, the earlier steps compressed so they still fit, and irrelevant material removed, at every turn. The window is finite and everything placed in it is paid for.
In practice
Agent projects rarely fail because the model was too weak. They fail because it was handed the wrong material, or too much of it, and a cluttered context is charged again on every step of the task.