The foundation

Seven short pages. The shared vocabulary every command assumes you speak. Read once.

01

The five-layer stack

Every piece of context belongs in exactly one layer. Mixing them is the root cause of "the agent did the right thing locally and broke everything else".
02

The ContextOps lifecycle

Build, distribute, maintain, update, measure. The DevOps-style discipline that keeps context from rotting.
03

Cognitive debt

Technical debt is code you wish was cleaner. Cognitive debt is code you wish you understood. AI accelerates one and reduces the other. Guess which.
04

Good practices

The moves high-performing teams have converged on. Every one of them has a command that operationalises it.
05

Anti-patterns

Ten things that look like good context engineering and are not. Reject every one of them, including in your own output.
06

MCP principles

Least-privilege binding, human-in-the-loop, centralised auditing. The non-negotiables when the agent reaches a real system.
07

Harness reference

Where each AI coding harness expects to find its context files. Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Copilot, Cowork: locations and formats.