This article introduces context engineering, explains why it matters for LLM application development and shows how it differs from traditional prompt engineering and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).
Context engineering is the discipline of building dynamic systems that supply an LLM with everything it needs to accomplish a task. To understand this, it’s essential to realize that an LLM’s “prompt” is not just a single string of text, but an entire context window of input the model sees before producing output. This context includes multiple components beyond the immediate user question..