Context Engineering Fundamentals

Context is the complete state available to a language model at inference time. It includes everything the model can attend to when generating responses: system instructions, tool definitions, retrieved documents, message history, and tool outputs. Understanding context fundamentals is prerequisite to effective context engineering.

When to Activate

Activate this skill when:

• Designing new agent systems or modifying existing architectures
• Debugging unexpected agent behavior that may relate to context
• Optimizing context usage to reduce token costs or improve performance
• Onboarding new team members to context engineering concepts
• Reviewing context-related design decisions

Core Concepts

Context comprises several distinct components, each with different characteristics and constraints. The attention mechanism creates a finite budget that constrains effective context usage. Progressive disclosure manages this constraint by loading information only as needed. The engineering discipline is curating the smallest high-signal token set that achieves desired outcomes.

Detailed Topics