A first-principles beginner's guide to context engineering for agents
sharpeye_wnl · x · 2026-11-10
A beginner-friendly long-form article explaining context engineering from first principles.
- The context window is the token budget a model can process at once; an agent is "an LLM working autonomously in loops using tools"
- Context engineering is the set of strategies for curating and maintaining the tokens used during inference — deciding what enters a limited window is the key to successful agents
- Attention budget: as context grows, an LLM's ability to recall information from it degrades — models spend a finite attention budget parsing large inputs
- From there the article derives concrete strategies for filtering, compressing, and maintaining context
A solid mental-model primer for developers building agents.
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