# Context engineering

Trusted, governed knowledge that people and agents can rely on.

- [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: knowledge as plain Markdown with a little structured metadata. It is the right foundation. Regulated enterprises need the next step: knowledge that states its own owner, provenance, freshness and trust.
- [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.
- [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.

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