Context Management

workflow

This item was not updated in last three versions of the Radar. Should it have appeared in one of the more recent editions, there is a good chance it remains pertinent. However, if the item dates back further, its relevance may have diminished and our current evaluation could vary. Regrettably, our capacity to consistently revisit items from past Radar editions is limited.

Mar 2026

Hold

Context management has been absorbed into the broader discipline of Context Engineering. See that entry instead.

Why It's Now on Hold

When this entry was created in January 2025, "context management" described the practice of curating what information you include in an AI conversation — file selection, system prompts, conversation hygiene, summarization.

Since then, the practice has evolved into context engineering — a more comprehensive discipline that includes everything context management covered, plus dynamic context pipeline design for long-running agents. Spotify coined the term in November 2025 and it's now the standard framing.

The techniques from the original entry (file selection, system prompts, conversation hygiene) remain valid — they're now covered under context engineering's "context selection" and "context structure" sections.

Key Characteristics

Property	Value
Status	Merged into Context Engineering
Successor	Context Engineering (Trial)