Context Engineering
Current Answer
Deciding what belongs in an agent’s context window — and what to leave out — so the model spends its budget on decision-relevant material.
Implementation Consequence
Most agent failures are context failures: too much noise, missing facts, or stale material. Treating context as a ranked budget makes sessions repeatable.
Evidence
Pixel Canary reaches 90.3% on Vercel’s Next.js eval and 96.8% with docs in AGENTS.md, but lacks ZDR and may use prompts and responses for training.
GPT-6 adds cache diagnostics, explicit breakpoints, and controls aimed at improving prompt-cache hit rates, giving agent builders more levers over repeated-context latency and cost.
CliffCompaction cuts long-horizon agent costs by dropping or truncating original context instead of rewriting summaries, aiming to prevent drift across repeated compactions.
A hypernetwork can synthesize a user-specific LoRA on-device from context tokens, offering persistent personalization without extending every prompt or running local training.
V7 uses GPT-5.6 to turn scattered company files into source-linked context for agents, targeting complex work that needs institutional knowledge.
Treat memory, context control, concurrency, and model routing as harness concerns. The workshop shows how these layers can improve agent behavior without changing model weights.
Harness components pay off differently by model and budget. Elide before summarizing, use planning selectively, and avoid elaborate tools when the model is already strong with bash.
Fixed chunk sizes leave query-dependent retrieval quality on the table; multiscale indexes plus reciprocal rank fusion improved recall across four tested datasets at a memory cost.
Agent search changes the retrieval workload: models issue long, iterative queries and inspect literal matches. BM25 remains useful, but tuning, harness design, and end-to-end evaluation matter.
Pinecone’s Nexus packages persistent company context behind an agent-facing query layer. The useful idea is to maintain goals, decisions, tables, and indexes once instead of rediscovering them per session.
Plan injection can make an actor follow adversarial instructions while producing reasoning that looks benign to a monitor. Agent builders should treat chain-of-thought inspection as one signal, not a security boundary.
Gavel routes skills from a frozen model’s internal states without loading skill text into context. It suggests large skill libraries may need model-native selection rather than metadata-heavy prompts.
AI did not start web-design sameness, but it accelerates it. Builders should give design agents explicit brand context, varied references, and checks for repetition, fit, and coherence.
ConvMem replaces sequential long-context memory updates with a parallel hierarchy of summaries, offering a training-free pattern for agents that must reason over oversized inputs.
An MCP widget can reduce an agent’s useful work if rendering and retrieval share one tool. Keep data exploration separate, then render only the results the model selects.
In one same-prompt test, a context engine nearly halved agent token use. The design goal is targeted, permission-aware retrieval that resolves conflicts across engineering systems.
Shared agent memory needs user-scoped reads, human-approved writes, and per-request credentials. The talk offers a concrete security boundary for company-wide context and tools.
Cross-silo agents are primarily a context and privacy-boundary problem. Start with low-sensitivity data, explicit sharing policy, and approval at the moment information leaves a silo.
A telecom diagnosis pipeline structures telemetry before forcing a decision path and evidence-grounded explanation. The pattern is relevant to agents reasoning over heterogeneous operational data.
For fuzzy requests, an agent should identify the missing constraint with the most decision value, elicit it in the right modality, then choose a response format suited to the task.
Shared agent skills can turn team know-how into portable workflows, but unmanaged catalogs create duplication and policy risk. Treat skills as versioned, evaluated dependencies.
Agents often stop after finding plausible code context. Werry argues for task-specific retrieval that also surfaces decisions, conventions, PR history, and expertise before planning or review.
CritICL turns recurring failures from smaller models into critique examples for stronger models, aiming to improve inference with fewer generations and lower token cost than repeated sampling.
For fast-changing libraries, ship concise agent-facing docs inside the package as well as on the web; agents may inspect installed code before visiting your site.
Notion treats GTM automation as a shared context system for humans and agents, not an AI layer over disconnected tools. The key design choice is keeping risky customer actions human-approved.
Tool-by-tool restrictions failed to contain a chip-design agent. Enforce permissions at the substrate, isolate files by role, and propagate approved spec changes from one source of truth.
LLM compliance generation behaves differently under vague and strict schemas: vague artifacts need richer context, while rigid formats can stay consistent yet hallucinate.
A coding agent with repository access still recommended a known outage trigger. Background agents need reconciled decisions and incident context, not just more raw MCP results.
ConceptTS turns LLM-proposed concepts into executable labels and interpretable forecasting bottlenecks, enabling concept-level inspection and intervention.
IAR turns a fixed document corpus into parametric knowledge through separate injection, QA alignment, and recovery stages. It improved domain QA while retaining more general capability than vanilla SFT.
Lease End replaced a fine-tuned intent classifier with skills and runtime context, cutting production fixes from about a week to under an hour. Higher API spend was offset by lower maintenance cost.
Automated code review depends less on a stronger model than on codifying team rules, architecture, incidents, and service contracts into context both humans and agents can inspect.
Nereu argues that coding agents need an engine-native vocabulary, not more generated glue code: tags, reusable systems, and selective scene context turn game intent into reliable actions.
In this AI-tutor evaluation, keeping full history beat compaction on recall and cost because cached tokens were cheap. Measure your constraint before shortening agent context.
Agent handoffs should preserve task-relevant predictive state, not blindly compress the transcript. The paper offers a three-part record for carrying decisions, evidence, and irreducible observations across sessions.
SheetCompass keeps spreadsheet structure as a hierarchical relation graph instead of flattening cells into text. Its agent memory retains task-relevant context across sheets, tables, and columns.
A small company-enrichment test suggests rented web context is convenient for changing queries, while repeated stable queries may justify owning the pipeline. The reported crossover was around 15,000 queries.
Persistent memory is a compute and product tradeoff, not just retrieval. Profiles need conflict detection, visibility, editing, and deliberate update cadence before agents can rely on them.
A useful agent knowledge base starts with abundant raw Markdown, then adds controlled tags, backlinks, and generated indexes. Scheduled agents can maintain it, but sync and taxonomy need explicit rules.
Stronger models can still behave like smart novices inside company-specific workflows. Agents need learning loops that compress experience into reusable context, procedures, and judgment without losing reliability.
Agent-Ready Context
Treat context as a budget, not a dump. Rank material by decision-relevance; evict anything that does not change the next action. Isolate noisy subtasks into subagents. Cache stable material where the platform allows.
Graph is progressive enhancement. Every edge listed below.