Context Engineering on Chris Reddington

AGENTS.md and SKILL.md: building a reusable agent toolbox

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I was working on a personal project and coming up with a Copilot CLI demo to show and tell at the GitHub Social Club in London yesterday. But as I started a fresh agent session, and typed the setup, I caught myself writing the same lines I’d written for some work a few days earlier.

It included a few lines around the process for writing out plans, how the agent should hand off between planning, what the implementation expectations were, and how to review the work when it was done. That repetition (me repeatedly hitting the up arrow to get to my earlier prompts) was a sign that the knowledge I was typing should be packaged as something reusable, not left as another throwaway prompt.

Context engineering: more context isn't better context

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I was in a customer presentation recently where I asked the room whether they were familiar with the term prompt engineering. Almost everyone raised their hand. This wasn’t a surprise, given how it’s been used over the last 3 years to make sure that being specific, giving examples, and setting clear instructions are part of the conversation around AI tools.

But then I asked whether they were familiar with context engineering. Only a few people raised their hand, and even fewer were using it as a deliberate way to think about how they work with AI agents. I genuinely expected more people to have heard of it given how much the term has grown over the past year, even if they weren’t applying the principles just yet.