Context Engineering: The Discipline That Determines What Your LLM Actually Sees

Prompt engineering asks: how do I phrase this instruction? Context engineering asks: what information does the model need, in what form, in what order, and how much of it — to produce a correct answer? For a long time, the implicit mental model was: give the LLM more context and it performs better. This is wrong. A 20,000-token window stuffed with weakly relevant content produces worse answers than a 4,000-token window with precisely curated information. Larger windows do not eliminate context…