The State of Context Engineering

The Job is Knowing When to Be Deterministic & When to Be Probabilistic This week, I gave a short talk at AGNTCon titled, “Context Fails & Fixes,” that functioned as a sort of “State of Context Engineering.” How did context engineering emerge, where has it gone, and where might it go in the future? As model makers target new capabilities, they inadvertently create challenges we, as users and harness builders, must overcome. Below are the slides and a lightly edited transcript. As always, shoot me a note with any feedback, thoughts, or questions. I really appreciate it. Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining me today. We’re going to walk through context fails and fixes. I have a book coming out in a bit, The Context Engineering Handbook. When I first talked to the team at O’Reilly, back in June 2025, they asked me a very reasonable question: “How do we know this won’t become obsolete in a few weeks?” The trouble with AI textbooks is that many age extraordinarily quickly. I said, I don’t know,…