Nufar Gaspar

And unlike other layers, this is not something that will be solved by better models.

Your specific context will always be yours, and no model improvements will ever, ever know what you're shipping next quarter or who your key stakeholders, unless you tell it.

And context files are the documents in your workspace that your agent read on demand, and they are not part of the prompt you type.

They are the library that the agent can reach for when the task needs it.

Now there is a big trap here.

If you're trying to context engineer in one session, you will produce a 40 page document and you never update that.

That's not context, it's just a quick to be stale novel.

So what actually works here is to have basically three to five focused files.

Each on a single page, each covers one thing, whether it's my team, my product, my customers, my quarter, my stakeholders, and so on.

Make it dated and fresh and update when things change.

And often we call it context curation, and it's not a project that has a beginning or an end.

It's a practice.

And every time you catch yourself re-explaining something about your situation to AI, that thing should have been in a context file.

write it down and add it to the library, and then you move on.

For example, for our chief of staff, we will at the very minimum need a stakeholders file, who reports to you, who you report to, key cross-functional partners, what each one cares about, and so on.

A strategy and priorities file, what you're trying to achieve this year, what the organization is focused on, and an operating principle file, how decisions get made, what you push back on, what you escalate, and so on.

And I believe that context creation is the single fastest path to AI value.

So the moment anyone gets this, whether it's you or people around you, this is where the conversation changes.

They stop asking what AI tool should I use and start asking what knowledge do I have that isn't written down anywhere.

And of course, if you want to go deeper on this layer, NLW did an amazing episode a few days ago called How to Build a Personal Context Portfolio in MCP Server.