03
Context engineering
Patterns for deciding what a model should be holding in its head, and when to throw it away. Each one is a short rationale, a template you can paste, and a note on where it fails.
The disposable scratchpad
Give the model a working area it is told to discard before answering. Cuts hedging without shortening the reasoning.
REASONING · 2 MIN
Facts before instructions
Where reference material sits relative to the task changes compliance more than any amount of prompt politeness.
STRUCTURE · 3 MIN
Budgeted retrieval
Cap what gets pulled in, and make the cap explicit to the model. Quality rises when the context is allowed to be small.
RETRIEVAL · 4 MIN
State the failure mode
Naming how the task usually goes wrong is worth more than describing how it should go right.
FRAMING · 2 MIN