Glossary term
Glossary term
Agentic Systems
Discipline of selecting, structuring, updating, and validating information an agent sees at each step.
Cognition AI's Devin uses context engineering to inject the right subset of codebase files, error messages, and memory summaries into each LLM call - avoiding context-window overflow while preserving task-relevant state.
LangChain's context-stuffing vs. map-reduce patterns represent competing context engineering strategies for long-document Q&A - teams A/B test them on retrieval benchmarks to find the optimal trade-off for their document corpus.
Simon Willison popularised 'context engineering' as the successor to 'prompt engineering', arguing that the key skill in 2025 is designing the data flows - what goes into the context window - not just the wording of instructions.