Context Engineering

Context engineering is deciding what occupies a model's context window at every step — tool definitions, retrieved content, conversation history, and the task itself — and in what order, not just what to write in a system prompt. It treats the window as a fixed, competed-for resource: every token spent on one slice is a token unavailable to another, so the allocation has to be a deliberate decision rather than whatever's left over once everything else is assembled. Prompt engineering is one input to it, not the whole discipline.

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