Context Engineering: 4 Core Strategies

LangChain formalized context engineering with four strategies now widely adopted in production agent systems: write (persist context externally), select (retrieve what's relevant via RAG), compress (summarize and compact), and isolate (separate contexts for different agents). Keeping base system prompts lean at 200–800 tokens while injecting context dynamically is the production sweet spot.

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Sources: Multi-Agent Orchestration Guide · Context Engineering Paper