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Context Engineering

ai-engineering context-window

The practice of designing what a language model sees across an entire session, not just a single message.

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Definition

Context engineering is designing the system that assembles the model’s context: which instructions load, which tools are available, what memory persists, which skills are defined, how hooks intercept. Every agentic capability is a context engineering decision. The goal is to make the right outputs probable by shaping the context window before anyone types anything. Prompt engineering is a subset: one message. Context engineering is the whole system.

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Source

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