Context Engineering Fundamentals
Why the industry renamed prompt engineering to context engineering, how to budget and assemble the whole context window, and the four failure modes — poisoning, distraction, confusion, and clash — interviewers expect you to name
The discipline that succeeds prompt engineering once a system has retrieval, tool calls, and conversation history: treating the entire context window — not just the prompt string — as an assembled, budgeted, ordered artifact. Covers the anatomy of a real app's context window, token-budget allocation across fixed and variable regions, selection and ordering strategies, compaction (summarization, truncation, structured notes), isolation between trust boundaries, the four named context failure modes with repro sketches, and a fully worked, real-numbers example of assembling one turn of a support bot's context.
Practice questions (5)
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A Support Bot's Context Budget Blows Up on a Single Customer
Intermediate · Free -
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Diagnosing Which Failure Mode Produced a Wrong Answer
Advanced -
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Reordering a Context Window for Attention and Cache Cost
Intermediate -
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Choosing a Compaction Strategy for a Long-Running Agent
Advanced -
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Resolving a Clash Between a Cached Tool Result and Fresh Data
Intermediate