Definition

What is Context Engineering?

The practice of deliberately designing, structuring, and managing the information provided to AI models to improve output quality and relevance.

Context engineering goes beyond prompt engineering by focusing on what information an AI system has access to, not just how instructions are phrased. It involves decisions about what to include and what to leave out, how to structure it, when to retrieve it, and how to keep it current. Wire automates much of the mechanical work of context engineering.

Related concepts

Context Window

The maximum amount of text (measured in tokens) that a language model can process in a single inference call.

RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)

A technique that retrieves relevant documents or data at inference time and injects them into the model's context window before generating a response.

Structured Context

Context delivered to AI models as organized, typed records with named fields rather than raw prose or unformatted text.

Further reading

Context Engineering: What Replaces Prompt Engineering Why MCP Failures Are a Context Engineering Problem Structured Context vs Raw Text for AI 7 Context Engineering Techniques for Production

All terms

View full glossary
AI Agent Context as a Service Context Container Structured Context Context Engineering Context Portability Context Rot Context Window MCP (Model Context Protocol) MCP Server RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) Semantic Search Wire

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