Author: Trix Cyrus
What Is Context Engineering?
If you spent 2023 and 2024 obsessing over prompt wording, chain-of-thought tricks, and few-shot examples, you were doing prompt engineering. If you're building AI agents in 2026, you've probably noticed that crafting the perfect instruction isn't the bottleneck anymore. The bottleneck is everything around the instruction: which documents got retrieved, how much conversation history survived, which tools the model can see, and whether any of it actually fits coherently in the model's head at inference time.
That broader discipline has a name now: context engineering.
The short definition
