METHODOLOGIE

context engineering

The discipline of deliberately assembling, structuring, and pruning the information given to a language model — instructions, retrieved documents, code, and history — so the limited context window carries exactly what a task needs. Treated as a first-class engineering concern, distinct from the wording of a single prompt.

Origin

Emerged in 2024-2025 as practitioners distinguished shaping a model's whole context from merely wording a single prompt.

category: Engineering of the context provided to AI agents
definition: Providing agents with rich, structured context (6 types; static vs dynamic)
dominant_period: 2025