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SkillsContext EngineeringContext Engineering Fundamentals
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Context Engineering Fundamentals

by muratcankoylan•Context Engineering

Foundational understanding of context window management, attention mechanics, and the 'lost-in-the-middle' phenomenon

1,850downloads
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~680tokens

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$ mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills/context-engineering && curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/muratcankoylan/Agent-Skills-for-Context-Engineering/main/skills/context-fundamentals/SKILL.md > ~/.claude/skills/context-engineering/fundamentals-SKILL.md

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Details

Published
2026/01/10
Language
markdown
Token Est.
~680

Resources

  • GitHub Repository

Tags

contextfundamentalsattentiontokensllmengineering
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Context Engineering Fundamentals

Foundational understanding of context window management for LLM applications.

What is Context Engineering?

Context engineering is the discipline of managing the language model's context window. Unlike prompt engineering, which focuses on crafting effective instructions, context engineering addresses the holistic curation of all information that enters the model's limited attention budget:

  • System prompts
  • Tool definitions
  • Retrieved documents
  • Message history
  • Tool outputs

The Fundamental Challenge

Context windows are constrained not by raw token capacity but by attention mechanics. As context length increases, models exhibit predictable degradation patterns:

  • Lost-in-the-middle phenomenon - Information in the middle of context is less accessible
  • U-shaped attention curves - Beginning and end receive more attention
  • Attention scarcity - Limited attention budget across tokens

Key Principle

Effective context engineering means finding the smallest possible set of high-signal tokens that maximize the likelihood of desired outcomes.

Topics Covered

  • Token budget management
  • Attention distribution patterns
  • Context window utilization
  • Signal-to-noise optimization