November 2027
Intermediate
300 pages
1h 59m
English
Overview
LLM applications often fail because the model gets the wrong information in the wrong form at the wrong time. That's a context problem, and it can't be solved with a prompt. Hands-On Context Engineering helps you design an inspectable, debuggable, and reliable context system to manage and deliver the right context to the model exactly when it needs it.
What sets this book apart is its system-first approach. Most tech guides treat prompting, RAG, and agents as separate techniques. Authors Xinye Tang and Wei Sun show how these methods fit together in a single cohesive context system as they guide you through building such a system step-by-step, then scaling it to multistep workflows and multi-agent systems.
- Build a minimal context system and evolve it into a more capable system
- Add retrieval, memory, and tools to incorporate external knowledge, persistent state, and dynamic computation
- Diagnose and fix common failures such as irrelevant retrieval, stale or conflicting memory, and context overload
- Extend the same design principles to more advanced scenarios, including workflow-driven systems and multi-agent architectures with scoped context and controlled handoffs
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