AI/Coding/History/Phase/5 - Context Engineering
- After agentic coding became the dominant paradigm, it took a while for engineers to understand how to let the agentic coding tools take actions in outside of the local filesystem, such as checking CI logs, reading JIRA or GitHub tickets, or opening PRs. After the introduction of MCP made this possible, there was a period of time where developers struggled to understand how agentic tools quickly filled up the AI/Context/Window and led to Context Rot. The term Context Engineering emerged as a way to signal the importance for minimizing the context needed to solve the problem at hand while still providing access to powerful tools.
- Sub-Phases
- After March 2025, many IDEs such as CursorAI and some CLIs such as Claude/Code implemented an MCP/Client into the agentic coding chat interface, so developers could give AI MCP Servers to which enabled them to ask the AI to both sense and act on external context, for example
- GitHub/MCP included the ability open and update PRs, to read CICD logs and GitHub/Issues
- Atlassian/MCP included the ability to edit and read Confluence, JIRA
- Playwright/MCP included the ability to check out a web application's display looked like in the browser, giving it the ability to "see"