Systems where AI agents execute multi-step tasks autonomously, raising interconnected questions about harness architecture, state management, reliability engineering, human oversight, and the organizational context those agents operate within.

Context engineering is the practice of deliberately constructing what an LLM receives in its context window — structuring, compressing, persisting, and retrieving information so agents produce reliable output across tasks and sessions.

LLM agents are software systems that pair a language model with tools, memory, and control flow to accomplish multi-step tasks autonomously; the emerging consensus is that reliability requires engineering constraints, not better prompts.

LLM engineering spans the full stack of building with large language models: training, inference optimization, agent architecture, harness design, and the operational tradeoffs that determine whether model capability translates into reliable software.

RAG grounds LLM outputs in external knowledge at inference time; recent work questions when vector similarity retrieval is the right tool and what alternatives — hierarchical indexing, KV caching, compiled wikis — better serve different workloads.