What Is Context Engineering?
Context engineering is the discipline of designing the entire information environment an AI model operates within. It goes beyond writing a single prompt β it encompasses the system prompt, retrieved documents, tool definitions, memory files, and structured metadata that together shape model behavior.
In 2026, the best AI practitioners are not writing better prompts. They are designing better contexts. Gartner, Anthropic, and OpenAI all recognize that the quality of an AI's context determines the quality of its output.