Allocate explicit token budgets to the three context zones instead of letting context grow unbounded

DataHub·medium signal

Production context engineering treats every context window as three zones — system prompt (stable instructions), dynamic context (retrieved docs, tool results, history), and the current query — and assigns each an explicit token budget. Pairing this with prefix caching for the static zone and conversation compression for the dynamic zone is the practical 2026 cost-control stack, making per-agent token spend predictable rather than emergent.