Context Engineering: What It Is, How to Work with LLM Agent Context, and Why You Get Paid for It
Context engineering is a set of techniques for collecting and maintaining optimal context when working with LLMs. It differs from prompt engineering (which only handles instructions) and complements RAG (knowledge delivery) and MCP (tool integration). The article breaks down the layers of an agent's context, four typical failure scenarios (poisoning, distraction, confusion, conflict), and a context management approach through write, select, compress, isolate.
Anthropic
OpenAI
Google/DeepMind
Alibaba/Qwen
LangChain





