Martin Fowler: Context Engineering for Coding Agents Is the New Bottleneck Discipline
Martin Fowler Blog·medium signal
Fowler's February 2026 article (still widely circulating) argues that context—what the model sees across system prompts, history, retrieved docs, tool outputs, and memory—is now the primary engineering constraint for coding agents, not model capability. The piece provides a concrete taxonomy of context types and surveys Claude Code's January 2026 configuration surface. Notable for the primary-source framing: this is the craft discipline hiding under the 'agentic engineering' label.