AI & models
Context engineering
The discipline of deciding exactly what goes into the model's limited context window — which files, which past messages, which instructions, which looked-up documents — so it has everything it needs and nothing that distracts it. Think of it as packing a small bag for a trip: the right items matter more than the most items, because space is finite and clutter hurts. It's the 2026 evolution of prompt engineering, focused on the whole working set rather than a single clever sentence.
Why it matters
Part of Context and the context window → When Claude misses something obvious or gets confused, it's often a context problem, not an intelligence problem — give it the right material and most failures disappear.