context-fundamentals

Context Engineering Fundamentals

Context is the complete state available to a language model at inference time. It includes everything the model can attend to when generating responses: system instructions, tool definitions, retrieved documents, message history, and tool outputs. Understanding context fundamentals is prerequisite to effective context engineering.

When to Use

Activate this skill when:

• Designing new agent systems or modifying existing architectures
• Debugging unexpected agent behavior that may relate to context
• Optimizing context usage to reduce token costs or improve performance
• Onboarding new team members to context engineering concepts
• Reviewing context-related design decisions

Core Concepts

Context comprises several distinct components, each with different characteristics and constraints. The attention mechanism creates a finite budget that constrains effective context usage. Progressive disclosure manages this constraint by loading information only as needed. The engineering discipline is curating the smallest high-signal token set that achieves desired outcomes.

Detailed Topics

The Anatomy of Context

System Prompts System prompts establish the agent's core identity, constraints, and behavioral guidelines. They are loaded once at session start and typically persist throughout the conversation. System prompts should be extr