Crafting Intelligent Agents with Context Engineering by Carly Richmond

In this talk Carly talked about how the context of an AI Agent works and what to pay attention to. She has also made a Blog post on the same topic you can find here: What is context engineering? Components, techniques, and best practices - Elasticsearch Labs

  • A context window should only have the information it needs to work on the task that it was given.
  • It will hallucinate if the required information is not part of the context.
  • A context contains several parts

Context Engineering

  • The prompt itself
  • Instruction on how the output should look like
  • RAG: Retrieval Augmentation Generation, meaning sending additional documents to the context window.
  • Short and Long term memor
    • A short term memory is for example the whole current chat window that you have open
    • Long term memory on the other hand is the whole history from the past, that is stored in a vector database or similar
  • Available Tools, essentially a set of functions for the AI to use
  • Depending on the given task, the LLM will decide itself when to use a tool or not. A tool could be the integration of getting flights information.
  • Structured Output, we describe to the AI the schema of what we expect