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Vol. I · No. 251
Mon · 8 Jun
A Daily Lexicon of Trustworthy Data
The Lexicon

006·35

context engineering

/ˈkɒntɛkst ˌɛndʒɪˈnɪərɪŋ/ - n.

1 [colloq.] Requirements-gathering, performed live, in a text box, by whoever is holding the laptop.Keep. Punchy.This is the problem.

Working definition

2. The practice of assembling the instructions, examples, and retrieved facts a model needs for a task within its context window.

Evidence
See also
  • context windowA budget the organization fills with everything except the one document that decided the matter.
  • prompt engineeringWriting the requirements doc you skipped, one sentence at a time, into a text box.
  • retrieval-augmented generationA pipeline that retrieves the company's contradictory documents and asks the model to sound certain about all of them.