Learning path · Context Engineering & Caching · 23
Context Engineering
Deliberate curation of what enters the prompt—ordering, compression, retrieval, and tool results—to maximize answer quality per token.
Why it matters
- Often beats raw model upgrades for RAG and agent reliability.
- Connects prompting, retrieval, memory, and caching decisions.
- Core skill for production orchestration in 2026 stacks.
Key ideas
- Selective inclusion
- Ordering heuristics
- Compression tiers
Top resources
- 01ArticleAnthropic
Contextual retrieval
Why this resource. How to assemble evidence so the window contains the right bits.
Covers in this concept
- chunk context
- retrieval
- 02DocsAnthropic
Prompt caching
Why this resource. Stable prefixes as an engineering lever, not a prompt trick.
Covers in this concept
- static prefix
- cache
Context engineering is the craft of assembling the smallest sufficient prompt. Rank retrieved chunks, deduplicate overlapping passages, summarize stale history, and inject tool outputs only when relevant. Co-design with evals: measure faithfulness and answer relevance as you change assembly rules. The best teams treat context assembly as code—typed, tested, and observable—not an ad hoc string concat in a route handler. Treat assembly code as a first-class service with unit tests on ranking, deduplication, and ACL filtering—not a 200-line script in a notebook.
Updated 2026-08-09 · Full learning path