Context Engineering

Overview

Feed agents the right information at the right time. Context is the single biggest lever for agent output quality — too little and the agent hallucinates, too much and it loses focus. Context engineering is the practice of deliberately curating what the agent sees, when it sees it, and how it's structured.

Instructions

The Context Hierarchy

Structure context from most persistent to most transient:

1. Rules Files (CLAUDE.md, etc.)   ← Always loaded, project-wide
2. Spec / Architecture Docs        ← Loaded per feature/session
3. Relevant Source Files            ← Loaded per task
4. Error Output / Test Results      ← Loaded per iteration
5. Conversation History             ← Accumulates, compacts