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Context Engineering

Term coined in dexter-horthy's April 2025 essay 12 Factor Agents. By 2026 it has bifurcated:

  • Narrow reading — RAG pipelines, retrieval, what goes in the context window per turn.
  • Broad reading (Horthy's preferred) — the full discipline of managing what the model sees: static assets, classification-first pipelines, session rotation under dumb-zone thresholds.

Why this matters

The broad reading reframes coding agents as a context-authoring problem, not a prompt-writing problem. Horthy's qrspi, static-asset-workflow, and control-flow-vs-prompt-flow are all sub-techniques of context engineering, together addressing: what does the model know, when, and why.