CRESS Principles for Context Engineering – S is for Small

We’ll get to the effective context limits of Large Language Models in due course, but let’s open with a software engineering fundamental. More than 75 years of people writing computer programs has taught us a few hard lessons, and one the of the most important is the size of the steps we take. In my early days, I could code for hours before compiling and running my program. And when I ran the program, it inevitably didn’t work. Of course. So I’d spend even more hours trying to figure out why it wasn’t working, and fixing the bugs. As a young software developer, I believed debugging was Programming Skill #1, because I spent so much of my time doing it. I later learned that this approach to writing programs was called “code-and-fix” development by those in the know. It’s the equivalent of shooting an entire movie without checking the footage, and then trying to fix all the mistakes in the editing suite. “Code-and-fix” is very costly, and the end result is less than ideal, to say the…