Side N
Enough, or Less? Context Engineering Said Both in One Week
Which sources back which section of this article, and what its evidence base looks like.
Which sources back which section
| Section | Sources behind it |
|---|---|
| What It Is | Riley Goodside, Hacker News; Simon Willison, quoting Goodside; Walden Yan, Cognition; Workaccount2, Hacker News; Tobi Lütke, X; Drew Breunig; Andrej Karpathy, X; Hong, Troynikov and Huber, Chroma; Cognizant; Anthropic Applied AI team; Anthropic, context management; Redis; Wikipedia, “Prompt engineering” |
| Timeline | Riley Goodside, Hacker News; Simon Willison, quoting Goodside; Erik S. and Barry Zhang, Anthropic; Dex Horthy, 12-Factor Agents; Walden Yan, Cognition; Workaccount2, Hacker News; Tobi Lütke, X; Drew Breunig; Harrison Chase, LangChain; Andrej Karpathy, X; Simon Willison, June 2025; Philipp Schmid; Hong, Troynikov and Huber, Chroma; Mei et al., arXiv; Cognizant; Anthropic Applied AI team; Anthropic, context management; Damon McMillan, arXiv; Zeng, Huang and He, arXiv; Redis; Wikipedia, “Prompt engineering” |
| The Argument | Riley Goodside, Hacker News; Workaccount2, Hacker News; Tobi Lütke, X; Drew Breunig; Harrison Chase, LangChain; Andrej Karpathy, X; Hong, Troynikov and Huber, Chroma; Anthropic Applied AI team |
| What Others Add | Hong, Troynikov and Huber, Chroma; Yichao Ji, Manus; Simon Willison, September 2025; Anthropic Applied AI team; Anthropic, context management; Damon McMillan, arXiv; Zeng, Huang and He, arXiv |
| Conclusion | Riley Goodside, Hacker News; Tobi Lütke, X; Harrison Chase, LangChain; Philipp Schmid; Hong, Troynikov and Huber, Chroma; Cognizant; Anthropic Applied AI team; Redis; Wikipedia, “Prompt engineering” |
What the evidence base looks like
- 23Sources behind this article
- 5Sections, every one of them sourced
- 20Read in full
- 3Read at the abstract only
| What the source is | How many | How they were read |
|---|---|---|
| Origin: the post, comment, file or paper in which a use of the term, a name or a finding first appeared | 8 | Six in full; two preprints at the abstract |
| Vendor: a company writing about its own practice, product, announcement or survey | 8 | All eight in full; what they say about themselves is on the page as theirs |
| Community: practitioners writing about the term and the practice | 5 | All five in full |
| Reference: a survey of the field and an encyclopaedia | 2 | The encyclopaedia in full; the survey at the abstract |
Reliable
Reliable, but with an interestWorth believing and reliableWeak on both, and used with careHonest, but thin
Worth believing