Context Engineering
Building the full world the model sees: context assembly and routing, compression and budgets, memory and state, tool context, and testing what was actually assembled.
- Chapters
- 6
- Hours
- 1
- Difficulty
- Intermediate
- 5.0intermediate
Context is more than the prompt
The six things that go into a context window every turn, why prompt engineering only covers one of them, and what the discipline of context engineering actually owns.
- 5.1intermediate
Context assembly and routing
Why a 1M-token window doesn't make context free, and the route-then-assemble pipeline that decides what the model actually sees.
- 5.2intermediate
Compression and context budgets
More context isn't better context. How lost-in-the-middle and context rot degrade long prompts, and when to trim, summarize, or re-retrieve.
- 5.3intermediate
Memory and state
What an LLM remembers between turns, between sessions, and across years, and the techniques that make each scope work without crowding the context window.
- 5.4intermediate
Tool context and metadata
Models have no clock, no role awareness, and no sense of locale. The metadata you inject and the way you describe tools prevent whole classes of confidently wrong answers.
- 5.5intermediate
Testing and observing context
Snapshot the assembled context, regression-test the assembly logic, and capture traces that can answer why the model saw what it saw.