Context Fundamentals

This is solid foundational thinking about how to structure what you feed Claude. It walks through treating context as a finite attention budget rather than just cramming everything in, and covers the U-shaped attention curve where middle content gets ignored. The four principles (recency, specificity, retrieval, and decomposition) are practical baselines for anyone building agents or debugging why their prompts aren't working. Worth reading if you're new to context engineering or keep hitting token limits without understanding why your results degrade. The 60-70% effective capacity threshold is the kind of non-obvious detail that saves you from learning it the hard way.