3 parts · reading order ↓
Better prompts help, but they're only part of the story. Context engineering is the craft of designing what an AI agent sees, when it sees it, and how that changes across the session. The goal isn't a bigger context window. It's a more effective one.
Start with minimal AGENTS.md and SKILL.md examples, then adapt the portable core alongside Copilot-specific concepts like custom instructions, agents and prompt files. This post explains what belongs where and how to check that the files improve a real agent task.
Conversation state and retrieved context lead naturally into memory, but only if we're clear about what memory is for. Rules, skills, and instruction files package what you already know. Memory should capture what the work itself teaches the system, and that means reflection, verification, and forgetting matter just as much as recall.