Context Engineering
It is to context what capital management is to cash.
In one sentence
The discipline of deciding what goes into context, when, and in what format: compression, summarization, on-demand loading, prioritization. It works for context the way capital management works for cash: the resource is limited and must be allocated.
Before
More information than fits
What it does
Decide what goes in, when, and how
After
Dense, relevant context
Example
The letter agent's window has a fixed budget: 40% for the annual report, 20% for the prior years' summary, 15% for policies, 25% free for the work. When the history grew, it started coming in summarized rather than in full. The prompt stayed the same; what changed was the allocation.
The common mistake
Stuffing everything into the context because the window is large. Context packed with irrelevant things worsens the outcome, because the model dilutes its attention and starts citing what was closest instead of what mattered.
In practice
- Write the context budget by process, as a percentage.
- Load on demand: the skill only comes in when the task is of that type.
- Before increasing the window, remove what is not used, which almost always solves it.
How to make it tangible
A written context budget by process: how much for instructions, data, history, and work.
Connects with
Translated from Portuguese with AI assistance.