New in 2025–2026New 2025Builds on other terms
Context engineering
Written by Minh Khang
What is Context engineering?
Context engineering is choosing the right information to give an AI at each step: enough to do the job, nothing extra to confuse it.
In 2025 people building AI started saying context engineering instead of prompt engineering: good answers depend on the documents, history and tools you pass in, not on the prompt alone. Too much hurts too: long contexts full of stale material make AI perform worse.
Context engineering in a shop
Instead of pasting a 30-page policy, pass only the returns section and the size chart when someone asks to swap sizes.
Sources
The dated facts on this page come from the original sources below.
Keep learning beyond the glossary
Read next
- BasicsContext windowA context window is how much text an AI can see in one go: the prompt, the documents and the conversation so far.
- BasicsPromptA prompt is what you type to give AI a job: who it should act as, what to do and what information to use. The clearer the prompt, the closer the result.
- Data and accuracyRAGRAG (retrieval-augmented generation) is letting AI find and read your documents before it answers, instead of answering from memory.