Effective context engineering for AI agents
Anthropic frames 'context engineering', curating the finite tokens an agent sees, as the successor to prompt engineering for long-running agents.
Treats context as a scarce resource with diminishing returns and describes strategies such as 'just in time' retrieval (agents keep lightweight identifiers and load data on demand) and note-taking for persistence. Published the day Claude Sonnet 4.5 added context-editing and memory-tool betas.
- Date
- Monday, 29 September 2025
- Lab
- Anthropic
- Kind
- paper
- Access
- paper only
Only the opening of the post was read; the term 'context engineering' was already circulating, Anthropic helped popularize the framing.
Sources
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