AI Glossary
Context engineering
What does “Context engineering” mean?
Context engineering: Deciding what goes into a model's limited context at each step: instructions, tool descriptions, retrieved documents, past results and memory. For agents running many steps, choosing and trimming this information often matters as much as the wording of the prompt.
What is an example of “Context engineering”?
Summarizing old tool outputs instead of keeping them verbatim can keep a long agent run focused and within limits.