Context Engineering

Overview

Context engineering is deciding what an AI coding agent has in its context window at each step: standing instructions, skill and tool listings, files it has read, command output, and the conversation so far. The window is finite and everything in it competes for the model's attention, so the work is curation: load what the current step needs, keep the rest reachable but out.

This skill does three jobs. It audits what a project loads today, moves each piece of knowledge to the mechanism that loads it at the right moment, and sets the habits that keep a long session usable. The facts below come from the tools' own documentation, not from folklore: where a number appears, it is one the vendor publishes.

Instructions

1. See what is loaded today

Inventory the instruction files from the shell:

wc -l CLAUDE.md CLAUDE.local.md AGENTS.md GEMINI.md .claude/CLAUDE.md .claude/rules/*.md 2>/dev/null
find . \( -name CLAUDE.md -o -name AGENTS.md -o -name GEMINI.md \) -not -path "*/node_modules/*"
ls .claude/skills .claude/agents .cursor/rules 2>/dev/null