Context Engineering

Purpose

Decide what an LLM sees, and what it does not. Context is a finite budget with a nonlinear cost curve: more context is not more capability, and past a point it is actively less.

When to Use

• Building an agent or assistant that runs over many turns.
• A model that performs worse as the conversation gets longer.
• Managing tool results, retrieved documents, or long files.
• Reducing token cost in a long-running system.

Capabilities