Context Engineering
also: context management · context curation
Curating everything the model sees each step — the discipline that replaced prompt-tweaking.
Context engineering is deciding what fills the context window at every step: system prompt, tools, retrieved knowledge, history, memory — and what stays out. Its four operations are write (persist outside the window), select (retrieve what matters), compress (summarize to budget), and isolate (split across sub-agents). It matters because attention is a finite budget: overstuffed windows degrade recall, add cost, and drift behavior.