curated · 2026-09-13

Tessl's Rob Hudson and Simon Maple argue the hardest part of agentic transformation isn't the agents—it's who owns the context, workflows, and artifacts that steer them. Their core rule: context ownership follows the organizational unit. Individual and team domain knowledge belongs to domain experts; the enablement team provides tooling and stewardship, not ownership. They also separate 'context engineering' (local, intimate work) from 'loop engineering' (which can be centralized). Get the ownership wrong and you either create a central bottleneck or a fragmented free-for-all.

This post breaks down four context engineering mechanisms that keep agents on track during long tasks: budget control to limit context length, compression to reduce redundancy, todo-state to track progress, and a memory module to retain key info. The post does not disclose implementation details or benchmark results, only the mechanism framework.