# Context Engineering

## Definition

Context engineering is the discipline of supplying agents with structured, governed organizational context at inference time — as opposed to prompt engineering approaches such as prompt stuffing, brittle RAG over raw files, duplicated wiki systems, or disconnected operational tooling.

## Key properties

- Retrieval mechanism: MCP, not prompt injection

- Goal: durable context graph, not one-off prompt construction

- Anti-patterns explicitly called out: passive docs-sync, thin embeddings wrapper, disconnected MCP endpoint with no operational integration

## Related terms

- [mcp](/definitions/mcp.md)

- [agent grounding](/definitions/agent-grounding.md)

- [rag context](/definitions/rag-context.md)

- [corestory](/definitions/corestory.md)