Glossary · Prompting & context
Context Engineering
Designing the full information environment supplied to a model at each step, including instructions, selected files, retrieved evidence, tool results, examples, state, and output constraints.
Why it matters
Model performance often fails because relevant evidence is missing, stale, badly ordered, or overwhelmed by noise.
In practice
Build a compact task packet with the goal, repository rules, relevant interfaces, recent tool output, and unresolved decisions, then update it as state changes.
Common confusion
Prompt engineering focuses on instruction wording. Context engineering also decides what evidence and state enter the model's working context.
Related terms
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