What is Context Engineering?
TL;DR
The strategic design and optimization of context information sent to AI models. An evolution of prompt engineering.
Context Engineering: Definition & Explanation
Context Engineering is the discipline of strategically designing and optimizing the context information sent to AI models — including system messages, tool definitions, conversation history, search results, and user messages. While prompt engineering focuses on 'how to write a single prompt,' context engineering focuses on designing the entire context of an AI system. Specific practices include selecting and ordering information retrieved via RAG, structuring system prompts, optimizing tool definitions, managing and compressing conversation history, and sharing context across multi-agent systems. It has become clear that AI agent performance depends more on context design than on model capability alone, and as of 2026, context engineering is recognized as one of the most critical skills in AI application development.