DadgogoAI Dictionary

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context engineering

noun \ˈkän-ˌtekst ˌen-jə-ˈnir-iŋ\
TopicPrompting & Context First known use2025 Senses1
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Definition of context engineering

  1. : the practice of deciding exactly what information, instructions, tools, and history go into a model's context window at each step, especially when building agents

    • The agent got smarter not from a better model but from better context engineering.
    • Context engineering is about what to leave out as much as what to put in.

Origin & history

first known use2025

Popularized in mid-2025 by tech leaders who argued that 'prompt engineering' was too narrow a name for the real work.

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Which of these is the meaning of context engineering?

Related terms

prompt engineering the practice of designing and refining prompts to get reliable, high-quality results from an… context window the maximum amount of text, measured in tokens, that a model can consider at one time… context rot the gradual decline in a model's accuracy and focus as its context window fills with more and… retrieval-augmented generation a technique in which a system first searches a collection of documents for relevant passages… AI agent an AI system that can pursue a goal over many steps on its own, deciding what to do next… harness engineering the work of building everything around an AI model that lets it act as a reliable agent…

Cite this entry

"Context engineering." AI Dictionary, Dadgogo, https://dadgogo.com/dictionary/context-engineering/. Accessed 4 Oct. 2026.

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