Aussie AI

Context Engineering

Last Updated 1 January, 2026

by David Spuler, Ph.D.

What is Context Engineering?

Context engineering is a generalization of prompt engineering that provides more "context to the LLM. Examples of additional context that isn't part of the prompt include environmental information, such as what's on your PC screen, or which app you're running on your phone.

Research on Context Engineering

Research papers include:

LangChain, June 2025, The rise of "context engineering", https://blog.langchain.com/the-rise-of-context-engineering/
Lingrui Mei, Jiayu Yao, Yuyao Ge, Yiwei Wang, Baolong Bi, Yujun Cai, Jiazhi Liu, Mingyu Li, Zhong-Zhi Li, Duzhen Zhang, Chenlin Zhou, Jiayi Mao, Tianze Xia, Jiafeng Guo, Shenghua Liu, 21 Jul 2025 (v2), A Survey of Context Engineering for Large Language Models, https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13334
Elvis, Jul 06, 2025, Context Engineering Guide: Prompt engineering is being rebranded as context engineering, https://nlp.elvissaravia.com/p/context-engineering-guide
Emilia David, August 13, 2025, Google adds limited chat personalization to Gemini, trails Anthropic and OpenAI in memory features, https://venturebeat.com/ai/google-adds-limited-chat-personalization-to-gemini-trails-anthropic-and-openai-in-memory-features/
Nathan Lambert, Aug 15, 2025, Contra Dwarkesh on Continual Learning: Don't try to make your airplane too much like a bird, https://www.interconnects.ai/p/contra-dwarkesh-on-continual-learning
Alisa Fortin, Aug 18, 2025, URL context tool for Gemini API now generally available, https://developers.googleblog.com/en/url-context-tool-for-gemini-api-now-generally-available/
Latent Space, Aug 20, 2025, "RAG is Dead, Context Engineering is King" — with Jeff Huber of Chroma: What actually matters in vector databases in 2025, why “modern search for AI” is different, and how to ship systems that don’t rot as context grows, https://www.latent.space/p/chroma
Ram Mohan Rao Kadiyala, Siddhant Gupta, Jebish Purbey, Giulio Martini, Suman Debnath, Hamza Farooq, 31 Jul 2025, DSBC : Data Science task Benchmarking with Context engineering, https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.23336
Muhammad Haseeb, 9 Aug 2025, Context Engineering for Multi-Agent LLM Code Assistants Using Elicit, NotebookLM, ChatGPT, and Claude Code, https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08322
Alexander Golubev, Maria Trofimova, Sergei Polezhaev, Ibragim Badertdinov, Maksim Nekrashevich, Anton Shevtsov, Simon Karasik, Sergey Abramov, Andrei Andriushchenko, Filipp Fisin, Sergei Skvortsov, Boris Yangel, 5 Aug 2025, Training Long-Context, Multi-Turn Software Engineering Agents with Reinforcement Learning, https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03501
Yanshu Li, Yi Cao, Hongyang He, Qisen Cheng, Xiang Fu, Xi Xiao, Tianyang Wang, Ruixiang Tang, 8 Aug 2025, M$^2$IV: Towards Efficient and Fine-grained Multimodal In-Context Learning via Representation Engineering, https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.04633
Rushi Wang, Jiateng Liu, Cheng Qian, Yifan Shen, Yanzhou Pan, Zhaozhuo Xu, Ahmed Abbasi, Heng Ji, Denghui Zhang, 2 Sep 2025, Context Engineering for Trustworthiness: Rescorla Wagner Steering Under Mixed and Inappropriate Contexts, https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04500
Jielin Qiu, Zuxin Liu, Zhiwei Liu, Rithesh Murthy, Jianguo Zhang, Haolin Chen, Shiyu Wang, Ming Zhu, Liangwei Yang, Juntao Tan, Zhepeng Cen, Cheng Qian, Shelby Heinecke, Weiran Yao, Silvio Savarese, Caiming Xiong, Huan Wang, 11 Sep 2025, LoCoBench: A Benchmark for Long-Context Large Language Models in Complex Software Engineering, https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09614
Hai Huang, 30 Sep 2025, Directed Information $\gamma$-covering: An Information-Theoretic Framework for Context Engineering, https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00079
Sunhao Dai, Jiakai Tang, Jiahua Wu, Kun Wang, Yuxuan Zhu, Bingjun Chen, Bangyang Hong, Yu Zhao, Cong Fu, Kangle Wu, Yabo Ni, Anxiang Zeng, Wenjie Wang, Xu Chen, Jun Xu, See-Kiong Ng, 22 Sep 2025, OnePiece: Bringing Context Engineering and Reasoning to Industrial Cascade Ranking System, https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.18091
Yang Zhao, Chengxiao Dai, Wei Zhuo, Yue Xiu, Dusit Niyato, 25 Sep 2025, CLAUSE: Agentic Neuro-Symbolic Knowledge Graph Reasoning via Dynamic Learnable Context Engineering, https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21035
Qizheng Zhang, Changran Hu, Shubhangi Upasani, Boyuan Ma, Fenglu Hong, Vamsidhar Kamanuru, Jay Rainton, Chen Wu, Mengmeng Ji, Hanchen Li, Urmish Thakker, James Zou, Kunle Olukotun, 6 Oct 2025, Agentic Context Engineering: Evolving Contexts for Self-Improving Language Models, https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04618
Mufei Li, Dongqi Fu, Limei Wang, Si Zhang, Hanqing Zeng, Kaan Sancak, Ruizhong Qiu, Haoyu Wang, Xiaoxin He, Xavier Bresson, Yinglong Xia, Chonglin Sun, Pan Li, 10 Oct 2025, Haystack Engineering: Context Engineering for Heterogeneous and Agentic Long-Context Evaluation, https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07414
Grant Gross, Oct 31, 2025, Context engineering: Improving AI by moving beyond the prompt, https://www.cio.com/article/4080592/context-engineering-improving-ai-by-moving-beyond-the-prompt.html