Context engineering

What is context engineering?

Context engineering is the practice of deciding what information to put in front of a model for a given task. It replaces prompt engineering's focus on phrasing with a focus on selection: which facts, which examples, which history, in what order, within a finite context window. It is a real discipline because more context is not better context — irrelevant material crowds out relevant material and degrades the answer. Done well, it is invisible: the model appears to already know what it needed, because the right material was assembled before the request reached it.