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nicolaygerold
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Context Engineering: How We Got Here
Workshop material. Every section has a short explainer in docs/ with ASCII diagrams, and a runnable demo — plugins for pi and Amp that live in this repo and load automatically when you run either agent here.
The one idea
An LLM predicts the next token from its weights and its context. You don't control the weights. So for you, the entire output is a function of the input — the prompt plus every tool result the agent pulls into its window.
Context engineering is deciding what goes into that window. This workshop walks through how that job moved: from the user to the harness, and now into the model itself.
The arc
2024 2025 2026<br>─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────▶<br>╭───────────╮ ╭────────────╮ ╭───────────────╮ ╭─────────╮ ╭─────╮<br>│ core loop │─▶│ compaction │─▶│ file-based │─▶│ handoff │─▶│ RLM │<br>│ (agents │ │ v1: lossy, │ │ compaction & │ │ targeted│ │ ??? │<br>│ are a │ │ lost your │ │ plan mode: │ │ extract-│ ╰─────╯<br>│ loop) │ │ instructions│ │ user does the │ │ ion │<br>╰───────────╯ ╰────────────╯ │ harness's job │ ╰─────────╯<br>▲ ╰───────────────╯ │<br>╰─────────────────────────────────╯<br>compaction is back: models got good<br>enough that lossy is recoverable
Agenda
Topic<br>Explainer<br>Demo
The core loop of an agent<br>docs/01-core-loop.md<br>core-loop/main.go (Thorsten's agent, runnable), pi's agent-loop.ts
Harness engineering<br>docs/02-harness-engineering.md<br>this repo's plugins — see the doc
Compaction: why v1 failed, why it's back<br>docs/03-compaction.md<br>two versions: .pi/extensions/compaction.ts (modern, ported from Codex, auto-loads) vs. .pi/demos/naive-compaction.ts (2024-style, load with pi -e)
File-based compaction<br>docs/04-file-based-compaction.md<br>.pi/extensions/checkpoint.ts
Plan mode<br>docs/05-plan-mode.md<br>.pi/extensions/plan-mode/, .amp/plugins/plan-mode.ts
Handoff<br>docs/06-handoff.md<br>.amp/plugins/handoff.ts, .pi/extensions/handoff.ts
Recursive Language Models (RLM)<br>docs/07-rlm.md<br>.pi/extensions/rlm.ts
Read tool vs. bash<br>docs/08-read-vs-bash.md<br>.pi/extensions/read-vs-bash.ts (context-cost meter), pi --tools bash vs. pi --tools read,bash
Edit tools vs. apply_patch<br>docs/09-edit-vs-apply-patch.md<br>.pi/extensions/apply-patch.ts
Diagrams are ASCII, inline in each doc.
Setup
Install pi: see pi.dev. Pi loads project extensions from .pi/extensions/.
Install Amp: see ampcode.com. Amp loads project plugins from .amp/plugins/.
Run either agent from this repo's root. The demo plugins load automatically.
Repo layout
docs/ explainers, one per topic, ASCII diagrams inline<br>core-loop/ Thorsten Ball's 400-line agent in Go, runnable<br>.pi/extensions/ pi demo extensions<br>.amp/plugins/ Amp demo plugins
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