Context engineering: how to

Prompt engineering is how you ask. Context engineering is what the model knows when it answers.

Learn the pattern once. It works in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Microsoft 365 Copilot, and in similar chat apps your organization already allows.

1. 1

   Decide how the model gets the facts

   Paste a small set, retrieve from a larger library, or use a hybrid. Choose for the job, not for the buzzword.

2. 2

   Audit the sources first

   Accurate, current, permitted, and conflict-free. Confident wrong answers usually start with bad inputs.

3. 3

   Keep the context budget tight

   More tokens are not automatically better. Give the smallest high-quality set most likely to produce the right answer.