I used the o word last week and it hit a few nerves. Ontologies bring context. But then context engineering is very poorly understood. Agent engineers speak about it, expect everyone is doing it, know but almost everyone is winging it. Here's what context engineering is definitely not - ie. longer prompts. What it actually is - the right information, with the right meaning, at the right time. Not more but the right information with the right meaning. Sounds super abstract. That's why a brief video that actually breaks down how to load context. Okay. Not brief. but context needs context.

The field is evolving from Prompt Engineering, treating context as a single, static string, to Contextual Engineering, which views context as a dynamic system of structured components (instructions, tools, memory, knowledge) orchestrated to solve complex tasks. 🔎 Nearly all innovation is a response to the primary limitation of Transformer models: the quadratic (O(n2)) computational cost of the self-attention mechanism as the context length (n) increases. All techniques for managing this challenge can be organized into three areas: 1. Context Generation & Retrieval (Sourcing Ingredients) Advanced Reasoning: Chain-of-Thought (CoT), Tree-of-Thoughts (ToT). External Knowledge: Advanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) like GraphRAG, which uses knowledge graphs for more structured retrieval. 2. Context Processing (Cooking the Ingredients) Refinement: Using the LLM to iterate and improve its own output (Self-Refine). Architectural Changes: Exploring models beyond Transformers (e.g., Mamba) to escape the quadratic bottleneck. 3. Context Management (The Pantry System) Memory: Creating stateful interactions using hierarchical memory systems (e.g., MemGPT) that manage information between the active context window and external storage. Key Distinction: RAG is stateless I/O to the world; Memory is the agent's stateful internal history. The most advanced applications integrate these pillars to create sophisticated agents, with an added layer of dynamic adaptation: Tool-Integrated Reasoning: Empowering LLMs to use external tools (APIs, databases, code interpreters) to interact with the real world. Multi-Agent Systems: Designing "organizations" of specialized LLM agents that communicate and collaborate to solve multi-faceted problems, mirroring the structure of human teams. Adaptive Context Optimization: Leveraging Reinforcement Learning (RL) to dynamically optimize context selection and construction for specific environments and tasks, ensuring efficient and effective performance. Contextual Engineering is the emerging science of building robust, scalable, and stateful applications by systematically managing the flow of information to and from an LLM. | 16 comments on LinkedIn