Context Engineering
The deliberate architectural process of selecting, formatting, and injecting the absolute best external data into a language model's input context window.
Think of It Like This
Like organizing the perfect dossier of strictly relevant case files for a detective before asking them to solve a complex murder mystery.
While prompt engineering focuses on phrasing questions correctly, context engineering focuses on the data pipeline that surrounds the prompt. This involves deciding exactly which retrieved documents to include, how to aggressively filter out noise, and what metadata to append. It is the most critical engineering discipline in building a robust RAG application.