"Context engineering goes beyond earlier approaches to refining agent behavior in software development, such as prompt engineering or retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). The latter primarily helps AI retrieve one-off documents when generating a response.
At a technical level, context engineering boils down to which information and tools you expose to the large language model (LLM) at the heart of an agent. This helps the LLM enrich its responses and programmatically decide its next course of action.
The easiest way to enact context engineering is by using system prompts. These are found in most AI tools and accept instructions that help define an agent’s role, goals, and constraints. System prompts can also include few-shot examples that demonstrate target input and output behaviors.
According to experts, establishing context for AI agents involves a mix of structured and unstructured data types. Core areas include:
- System behaviors: code and documentation.
- System architecture: database schemas and deployment configurations.
- Code events: commits, pull requests, and review threads.
- Error information: tickets, failure logs, build output, and feedback from linters or compilers.
- Rationale: chat histories and design documentation.
- Business rules: compliance policies and operating procedures.
- Team behaviors: common workflows and execution patterns.
“This data is used to inform reasoning, guide execution, align with goals, and enable adaptive learning,” said Babak Hodjat, chief AI officer at Cognizant, an IT consulting company that recently announced plans to deploy over 1,000 context engineers within the next year."
https://leaddev.com/ai/what-is-context-engineering
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