The article surveys the fast-emerging practice of “context engineering” for coding agents, using Claude Code as the primary example. It outlines how developers can shape an agent’s awareness of a codebase and task—through workspace indexing and retrieval, selective file/context inclusion, persistent and ephemeral memory, and tool/environment hooks—and explains the trade-offs around relevance, latency, cost, and privacy. It also highlights how different assistants expose these controls and offers pragmatic guidance on debugging context issues, choosing and combining context sources, and standardizing configurations across a team.
The number of options we have to configure and enrich a coding agent’s context has exploded over the past few months. Claude Code is leading the charge with innovations in this space, but other coding assistants are quickly following suit. Powerful context engineering is becoming a huge part of the developer experience of these tools. Birgitta Böckeler explains the current state of context configuration features, using Claude Code as an example.
Login to comment
Login