Context engineering
The practice of deciding everything a model sees before it answers: instructions, examples, files, tool results, memory. Widely treated as the successor to prompt engineering, since a good prompt with bad context still fails.
“The agent kept inventing API endpoints until we fixed the context engineering and gave it the real schema.”
See also
In the history of AI
Part of the Extended list
Context engineering is on the Extended list: builder jargon, industry terms, and newer slang for when you want to go further. It entered common use around 2025.