Welcome

Thank you so much for purchasing the MEAP edition of "Context Engineering."

Tobi Lütke, the CEO of Shopify, coined the term context engineering in a tweet on June 19, 2025. He defined context engineering as the art of providing all the context for the task to be plausibly solvable by the LLM. This novel concept captures the essence of the current evolution of LLM-based systems, inspiring others (like me) to understand and define this emerging discipline. Since then, I have been working on this Manning book.

As explained in this book, context engineering is a discipline for builders with AI. A context- aware system should consider not only the context sources (instructions, external knowledge, tools, memory, state, and user prompt), but also how these sources are managed (selected, written, compressed, and isolated) and orchestrated (shared in agentic systems). Thus, context engineering can be seen as a set of techniques that estimate which information matters, assemble that information under constraints, adapt based on feedback, and measure whether the assembled context improves the target behavior.