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Context Engineering for Agents

(rlancemartin.github.io)
114 points 0x79de | 1 comments | 01 Jul 25 10:56 UTC | HN request time: 0.202s | source
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dmezzetti ◴[04 Jul 25 10:38 UTC] No.44463271[source]▶
Good retrieval/search is the foundation of context. It's definitely garbage in - garbage out here otherwise. Search is far from a solved problem.
replies(1): >>44465421 #
1. rapjr9 ◴[04 Jul 25 15:34 UTC] No.44465421[source]▶
Context is a much bigger problem. For an agent to have appropriate context to offer advice it has to know many things about the specific environment and state of the person querying the agent. For example, to answer the question "what's the weather going to be like later today" the agent has to know where the person is. If they are indoors you may not be able to get that from their cellphone GPS. If they are using a proxy server you may not be able to get location from their IP address. They may have Bluetooth and WiFi turned off. They may not have a default location set or could be somewhere else. The agent also needs to know where the person is going to be "later today". They might be on a plane flying to a new location or driving or on a train. They may have just changed their plans because of a phone call they received and plan to head to a new location. The weather may be complex with a hurricane forming nearby or a storm with tornado potential may be moving through the area.

Context is very difficult for computers to acquire and understand. In some cases it requires knowing what a person is thinking or their entire life history. The sensors currently available are very limited in their ability to gather context; for example sensing mood, human relationships, intentions, tastes, fashion, local air temperature, knowledge about building layout, customs, norms, and a lot more. Context is a huge ontology problem and it's not going to be solved any time soon. So agents are going to be limited in what they can do for a long time. At a minimum an agent probably needs to know your entire life history, and the life history of everyone you know, and the past history of the area you are in. More limited ideas of context may be useful, but context as humans understand it is immensely complex. Even if you define context as just what a person supplies to a chatbot as context, the person may not be able to supply everything relevant to the question at hand because context is difficult for people too. And everything relevant to a question is most certainly not always available on the web or in a database.