What is Context engineering?

Context engineering is the discipline of deciding what an AI model sees at the moment it answers: which passages, in what order, with which metadata and instructions. It has replaced prompt wording as the main lever on answer quality.

Also known as: context window management, prompt context.

Bigger context windows did not remove the problem; they changed it. Models attend unevenly across long inputs, so stuffing a whole handbook into the prompt degrades accuracy and cost at once. Selecting twelve good passages beats pasting two hundred pages.

How Uthereal handles it

Uthereal treats context assembly as a product surface: retrieval, reranking, deduplication and budget control are configurable rather than hidden.

Related reading

Last updated 2026-09-18 · plain-text glossary for AI tools