The State of Context Engineering
This was interesting to me because I was under the naïve impression that context management was a thing of the past, but in actuality it's the opposite: context is here to stay, and managing it has different problems now than it did in the past. Comments
This week, the author gave a talk at AGNTCon, titled "Context Fails & Fixes," as a "State of Context Engineering" overview. They discussed how model makers inadvertently create challenges for users and harness builders as models target new capabilities. The author's book, "The Context Engineering Handbook," is upcoming. Despite AI textbooks aging quickly, the author remains optimistic about conveying instructions consistently and avoiding noisy instructions with AI.
The talk explored context fails and fixes, emphasizing that models are not people and have unique failure modes. The author mentioned the "RAG is dead" moment and the push for larger context windows, leading to models like Gemini 1.5 Pro and Llama 4 Scout with million-token contexts. However, these large contexts brought new problems, such as context poisoning, distraction, confusion, and clashes.
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- The State of Context Engineering dbreunig.com
