Individual skill
context-engineering
Designing what information goes into the context window and in what order.
claude-plugin/prompt-architecture/skills/context-engineering/SKILL.md
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# Context Engineering
The context window is finite. What goes into it — and in what order — determines the quality of every output. Context engineering is the practice of deliberately designing the information architecture of the context window.
## The Context Budget
Every context window has a token budget. Allocate it deliberately:
- **System prompt**: The foundational instructions (typically 5-20% of the budget)
- **Retrieved context**: Documents, data, and information pulled in for the current task
- **Conversation history**: Previous turns in the conversation
- **User input**: The current request
- **Working space**: Room for the model to generate its response
These compete for space. More retrieved context means less conversation history. A longer system prompt means less room for everything else.
## Information Architecture in Context
Order matters. The model pays different amounts of attention to different positions:
- **Beginning**: High attention. Put your most important instructions here.
- **Middle**: Lower attention. This is where information can get lost in long contexts.
- **End**: High attention. The most recent information (user input) naturally goes here.