Context budgets: how to allocate tokens for AI agents
A practical guide to context budgets for AI agents. How to allocate tokens across system prompts, tools, retrieval, history, and a buffer in production.
A practical guide to context budgets for AI agents. How to allocate tokens across system prompts, tools, retrieval, history, and a buffer in production.
Context poisoning plants false data into an AI agent's memory or RAG index. The model treats it as truth. It's a context engineering problem, not a model bug.
Token prices fell 280x but enterprise AI spend rose 320%. Poor context architecture drives 60-70% of total AI costs. Here is where the money actually goes.
RAG vs long context in 2026: which wins on cost, speed, and accuracy, and when each one beats the other in production. What the benchmarks actually show.
Most AI inaccuracies in production are context quality failures, not model fabrications. Here's the research on what context engineering actually changes.
77% of employees share sensitive data with AI tools. Five context engineering patterns give AI what it needs without exposing what it shouldn't see.
Context compression reduces AI agent memory usage by 26-54% while preserving task performance. Here's how it works and why bigger context windows aren't the answer.
Prompt caching reduces AI agent API costs by up to 90% and latency by 31%. Here's how it works, where it breaks, and how to implement it right.
AI customer service fails at 4x the rate of other AI tasks. Support bots need five types of context most teams never provide. The model isn't the problem.
65% of agent failures come from context drift, not token limits. Here's how context compression keeps long-running AI agents on track.