What is…
Context engineering
Deliberately choosing what goes into the model's context — instructions, files, examples, tools — to get reliable results.
Prompt engineering is wording one request well. Context engineering is designing everything the model sees: which documents, which past messages, which tools, which project instructions (like a CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md file), and what to leave out.
More context isn't better — relevant context is. Stale or noisy context degrades answers.
🧠 Test yourself
Which of these describes Context engineering?
Related terms
Prompt
The instructions and context you give a model — the single biggest lever on the quality you get back.
Context window
How much text a model can 'see' at once — your conversation, files and instructions, all measured in tokens.
System prompt
Behind-the-scenes instructions that set a model's role, rules and style for the whole conversation.
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