Context Engineering Foundation

Context Engineering Foundation is a two-day, hands-on course that teaches engineers and architects how to design, manage, and evolve context as a first-class system in modern LLM-powered applications. Moving beyond ad-hoc prompt engineering, the class provides a structured mental model for understanding how instructions, data, memory, tools, and state interact within context windows, and how those interactions affect cost, latency, accuracy, and reliability. Participants learn practical techniques for instruction hierarchy, context layering, structured knowledge representation, retrieval-augmented context, and memory management, with an emphasis on avoiding common failure modes such as hallucination, drift, and prompt injection. Through lectures, demos, and labs, attendees gain repeatable patterns for building scalable, evaluable, and maintainable context pipelines that support real-world AI systems and agent-like workflows.

This course is designed to provide a comprehensive overview of Context Engineering including:

• Design context as a structured system composed of instructions, data, memory, tools, and state
• Analyze context window constraints and make informed tradeoffs between cost, latency, accuracy, and reliability using a “context budget” mindset
• Create stable, layered instruction hierarchies that prevent conflicts, leakage, and prompt-injection vulnerabilities
• Select and apply appropriate context representation strategies, including structured data, few-shot examples, embeddings, and inline references
• Build and troubleshoot retrieval-augmented context pipelines, identifying and correcting common RAG failure modes
• Implement effective short-term and long-term memory strategies while avoiding unnecessary state accumulation and context drift
• Define clear model–tool boundaries and design tool schemas that enable reliable, agent-like workflows
• Evaluate, version, and iteratively improve context designs using qualitative analysis, quantitative metrics, and regression testing