Context engineering — The AI Glossary

AI Glossary / Techniques

Context engineering.

all levels Techniques

Also known as: context over prompt engineering

Instead of writing one big clever prompt every time, you build up a set of reusable files about your business: what you do, who your ideal customer is, your brand voice. The AI agent reads all of that before it touches the task, so it already knows everything it needs.

That's the whole trick. Once the context is there, your prompts can stay stupidly simple. I just say "write me an about-me paragraph" and it loads those files and nails it, because it isn't guessing who I am anymore.

This is the part that matters once you're actually building. The models are already smart enough. The bottleneck now is how much quality context you can give them. So you stop fussing over prompt wording and start investing in the background knowledge your agent carries into every job. Write it once, reuse it forever.

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