Originally published on AI Tech Connect.
What you need to know Context engineering is not prompt engineering. Prompt engineering is how to ask. Context engineering is what the agent knows, sees and remembers at the moment of action — memory, policies, tool outputs, prior-step history and sub-agent visibility boundaries. The window is a budget, not a bucket. Effective context is smaller than the advertised window. Recall degrades before the hard limit. Spend tokens deliberately. Order matters. Put the most decision-relevant material first, right after the system prompt. Models attend most reliably to the start and the end. Memory is structured, not a dump. Short-term working context, long-term semantic and episodic memory, and periodic summarisation each have a job. Tool outputs are the silent killer. A raw 40k-token API response…
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