Anthropic's Context Engineering Guide

• Source: Anthropic Engineering Blog

The most important paradigm shift in the vibe coding space: context engineering replaces prompt engineering. Even with larger context windows, "context pollution and information relevance concerns" persist. The solution is better curation, not bigger windows. Key pattern: maintain lightweight identifiers (file paths, URLs, stored queries) and dynamically load data via tools at runtime. Few-shot examples outperform exhaustive rule lists. Sub-agents should return condensed 1,000-2,000 token summaries, not full exploration results.