Structure agent context as six stacked layers instead of one prompt

Nathan Onn·medium signal

A 2026 context-engineering model decomposes 'context' into six layers — static, behavioral, persistent, modular, isolation, and pipeline — each solving a distinct problem and building on the one below it, so you debug context the way you'd debug a stack rather than tweaking prose. The discipline reframes the goal as 'build the right world around the model so it barely needs prompting,' moving leverage from wording to structure. Map your current setup onto the six layers to spot which one is missing (e.g., no isolation layer → context bleed; no persistence layer → session amnesia) and fix that layer specifically.