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# 6 Components of Context Engineering

**[Daily Dose of Data Science \| Avi Chawla \| Substack](https://daily.dev/sources/dailydoseofds)** · 5 min read · 87 upvotes · 3 comments

## Summary

Context engineering is the practice of optimizing how information flows to AI models, comprising six core components: prompting techniques (few-shot, chain-of-thought), query augmentation (rewriting, expansion, decomposition), long-term memory (vector/graph databases for episodic, semantic, and procedural memory), short-term memory (conversation history management), knowledge base retrieval (RAG pipelines with pre-retrieval, retrieval, and augmentation layers), and tools/agents (single and multi-agent architectures, MCPs). While model selection and prompts contribute only 25% to output quality, the remaining 75% comes from properly engineering these context components to deliver the right information at the right time in the right format.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://blog.dailydoseofds.com/p/6-components-of-context-engineering>

## Community discussion

Top comments from developers on daily.dev.

**@zalts** · 1 upvotes

> would be interesting to see core components for saving tokens while keeping the same efficiency

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---

Tags: [#ai-agents](https://daily.dev/tags/ai-agents), [#llm](https://daily.dev/tags/llm), [#prompt-engineering](https://daily.dev/tags/prompt-engineering), [#rag](https://daily.dev/tags/rag), [#vector-search](https://daily.dev/tags/vector-search)

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