Context engineering: “the delicate art and science of filling the context window with just the right information for the next step” -- Karpathy (2025)
It’s quite hard to do this well one-shot. But it’s quite easy to do as part of a conversation, where the other party can ask questions, provide suggestions, etc. Also avoids recapitulating basic / unnecessary things
I’ve used this successfully for both coding assistants and thinking assistants.
Start with a simple high level question / goal, and write a few paragraphs that try to convey the ‘gist’ of it
Discuss with the thinking agent—identifying constraints, desiderata, subgoals, brainstorming approaches, …
This is also where I get to express opinions on implementation details, if any
Once we’re both happy with the plan, distill into a minimal, self-contained summary. Coding agent goes off and executes with minimal oversight from me
Iterative context engineering
It’s quite hard to do this well one-shot. But it’s quite easy to do as part of a conversation, where the other party can ask questions, provide suggestions, etc. Also avoids recapitulating basic / unnecessary things
I’ve used this successfully for both coding assistants and thinking assistants.
Start with a simple high level question / goal, and write a few paragraphs that try to convey the ‘gist’ of it
Discuss with the thinking agent—identifying constraints, desiderata, subgoals, brainstorming approaches, …
This is also where I get to express opinions on implementation details, if any
Once we’re both happy with the plan, distill into a minimal, self-contained summary. Coding agent goes off and executes with minimal oversight from me