Context Engineering
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Last Updated 17 June, 2026
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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.
Context Engineering: Book Excerpts and Blog Articles
Free online book excerpts with full text chapters online and free PDF downloads, and the Aussie AI blog, including related articles:
- David Spuler, Michael Sharpe, 2025, Transformers & LLMs, Chapter 13, in "Generative AI Applications", https://www.aussieai.com/book/ai-apps-book-13-transformers-llms
- David Spuler, Michael Sharpe, 2025, Prompt Engineering, Chapter 17, in "Generative AI Applications", https://www.aussieai.com/book/ai-apps-book-17-prompt-engineering
- David Spuler, March 2024, Chapter 2. Transformers & LLMs, in book "Generative AI in C++", https://www.aussieai.com/book/chapter-2-transformers-llms
- David Spuler, March 2024, Generative AI in C++: Coding Transformers and LLMs, https://www.aussieai.com/book/toc PDF: https://www.aussieai.com/pdf/BOOK-Generative-AI-CPP-Spuler-2024.pdf
- David Spuler, May 31st, 2026, Chapter 6. Deployment Architecture, in book LLM Inference Optimization: State-of-the-Art Research, Table of Contents: https://www.aussieai.com/book/llm-inference-optimization https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H3FKR39T
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
- Yichao 'Peak' Ji, July 2025, Context Engineering for AI Agents: Lessons from Building Manus, https://manus.im/blog/Context-Engineering-for-AI-Agents-Lessons-from-Building-Manus
- dbreunig.com, Apr 4, 2026, How Claude Code Builds a System Prompt, https://www.dbreunig.com/2026/04/04/how-claude-code-builds-a-system-prompt.html
- David Spuler, Michael Sharpe, 2025, Transformers & LLMs, Chapter 13, in "Generative AI Applications", https://www.aussieai.com/book/ai-apps-book-13-transformers-llms
- David Spuler, Michael Sharpe, 2025, Prompt Engineering, Chapter 17, in "Generative AI Applications", https://www.aussieai.com/book/ai-apps-book-17-prompt-engineering
- David Spuler, March 2024, Chapter 2. Transformers & LLMs, in book "Generative AI in C++", https://www.aussieai.com/book/chapter-2-transformers-llms
- David Spuler, March 2024, Generative AI in C++: Coding Transformers and LLMs, https://www.aussieai.com/book/toc PDF: https://www.aussieai.com/pdf/BOOK-Generative-AI-CPP-Spuler-2024.pdf
- David Spuler, May 31st, 2026, Chapter 6. Deployment Architecture, in book LLM Inference Optimization: State-of-the-Art Research, Table of Contents: https://www.aussieai.com/book/llm-inference-optimization https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H3FKR39T
- Jiacheng Liu, Xiaohan Zhao, Xinyi Shang, Zhiqiang Shen, 14 Apr 2026, Dive into Claude Code: The Design Space of Today's and Future AI Agent Systems, https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14228
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