Context Engineering Glossary Definition

Context engineering is the practice of designing, assembling, and managing the information a model receives so it can perform a task accurately and safely.

AI teams use context engineering to combine prompts, retrieved documents, tool outputs, conversation history, instructions, and guardrails for production AI applications. This is an emerging term, so teams should verify how a specific source, platform, or standard uses it before treating it as a settled category.

Additional Resource: Authoritative source.

Related concepts include Prompt Engineering, Retrieval-Augmented Generation and AI Agent.