AI ENGINEER DEX
StandardContextCX-001Reviewed Aug 2026

Treat context as a scarce budget

Deliberately curate everything the model sees on each call rather than stuffing the window.

WHY IT HOLDS

Models have limited attention: the more you add, the harder it is to stay focused and recall accurately. The goal is the smallest set of high-signal tokens that gets you the outcome you want.

WHAT IT PREVENTS

Degraded reasoning and recall from an overloaded window.

ADOPTED BY

2 organisations

Anthropic, Manus

SOURCES

START HEREEffective context engineering for AI agentsBlog · Anthropic · Sep 2025
BlogContext engineering for AI agents: lessons from building ManusManus · adopted by · Jul 2025

RING HISTORY

Aug 2026 — set to Standard. Manus has no stake in Anthropic's product and reaches the same conclusion.

RELATED

Don't fill the window past roughly 40%Keep identifiers, load the data at runtime

DOES THE PRACTICE WORK FOR YOU?

Field reports are not open yet. When they are, you will be able to sign in with GitHub and record whether this practice held on your stack — one report per person, so the counts mean something. Nothing is collected here in the meantime.