Term
Context engineering
The discipline of shaping what an LLM sees in its context window — instructions, examples, retrieved data, conversation history — to elicit reliable behaviour. Evolved from 'prompt engineering' to acknowledge that the prompt is one piece of a larger context budget.
Background
Context engineering covers prompt design, retrieval strategy, conversation pruning, summarisation, tool descriptions, and the order in which information is concatenated. As context windows grew past 200k tokens, prompt-only engineering became insufficient — what you put into the window and how you arrange it matters as much as the prompt template.