# Context engineering

Essays and notes tagged Context engineering.

- [Self-describing knowledge: why the Open Knowledge Format matters, and what enterprises must add](https://muthub.org/writing/self-describing-knowledge-open-knowledge-format.md) (Sep 15, 2026): In June, Google Cloud published the Open Knowledge Format, and July's v0.2 added provenance, verification and freshness. It is the right foundation. Regulated enterprises still need to add ownership, classification and a policy for how much trust an agent needs before it acts.
- [Passive capture: knowledge that writes itself, with humans who approve it](https://muthub.org/writing/passive-capture.md) (Aug 18, 2026): Documentation fails because it is a second job. The knowledge we need is already produced as a by-product of work: commits, tickets, incidents, reviews and decisions. Capture it passively, distill it, and keep a human approval gate before anything becomes trusted.
- [Not another data lake: context needs curation, not collection](https://muthub.org/writing/not-another-data-lake.md) (Jul 21, 2026): The tempting answer to fragmented context is to pour everything into one place. We tried that with data, and many lakes became swamps. A context layer has to be a curated overlay: retrieval-first, owned, and pointing back to the systems that hold the truth.
- [Capture the why: the knowledge layer enterprise agents are missing](https://muthub.org/writing/capture-the-why.md) (Jul 14, 2026): Most enterprise AI pilots hit the same wall: systems record what happened, but the reasoning behind decisions evaporates. Durable, governed context about the why is the real foundation for useful agents.
- [Context fragmentation: why your agents keep starting from zero](https://muthub.org/writing/context-fragmentation.md) (Jun 30, 2026): The knowledge an agent needs is scattered across code, tickets, chat, wikis, incident tools and people's heads. Each fragment is accurate and useless alone. Fragmentation, more than model quality, is what makes enterprise agents brittle.
- [The cost of unmanaged context](https://muthub.org/writing/the-cost-of-unmanaged-context.md) (Jun 2, 2026): Enterprises budget for compute, models and licenses, but almost none budget for the context those models depend on. Unmanaged context is the largest cost nobody tracks, and every new AI agent adds to it.
- [Living documentation and the human trust gap](https://muthub.org/writing/living-documentation-trust-gap.md) (Nov 19, 2025): Docs that regenerate on every commit describe what code does. The harder, more valuable problem is capturing why it exists.

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Muthukrishnan (Muthu) Bommiah · https://muthub.org · Views are my own and do not represent my employer.