Context Engineering

Context engineering is the practice of designing systems that provide a Large Language Model (LLM) and AI agents with all the necessary information to complete a task effectively. It goes beyond prompt engineering since it focuses on building a comprehensive and structured context from various sources like instructions, external knowledge, memory, tools, and state. The central idea is that the success of a complex LLM-based system depends more on the quality and completeness of the context provided than on the specific wording of the prompt itself.

Tobi Lütke, the CEO of Shopify, coined the term context engineering in a tweet on June 19, 2025. He defined context engineering as the art of providing all the context for the task to be plausibly solvable by the LLM.

This site is a companion resource for the book Context Engineering: Building Consistent, Accurate, Predictable AI Systems, to be published by Manning in 2026. It provides a strong, general-purpose theoretical foundation for context engineering, supported by hands-on examples available in the GitHub repository.

Warning: This content is a work in progress, so content and structure may change.