AI engineering glossary · Prompt context engineering
What is context budget?
Context budget: The share of a model's available input space you allow each kind of content, such as instructions, documents, memory and tool output. Because space and cost are limited, deciding what deserves room is a core design choice.
Context budget: an example
Cap retrieved documents at 6,000 tokens so that history and instructions never get squeezed out.
Related terms
More Prompt context engineering terms
- Context compression
- Context engineering
- Context stuffing
- Context truncation
- Contrastive chain-of-thought
- Conversation buffer memory
- Conversation history
- Delimiters
Where you learn it
Context budget is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.