Design Patterns in Context Engineering

Lessons in this section

1. Grounded Responses

   How to make the model answer only from its sources: source of truth, refusal rules, evidence boundaries, and citations with quotes, ids, sections and pages that code can check.

2. Retrieval Patterns

   How to handle retrieved documents once they are in the context: relevance, not-enough-evidence, confidence, and metadata such as region, date, tier, role and clearance, plus conflict rules.

3. Memory Patterns

   How to plan tool use, track where facts came from, and compress a long conversation into a state snapshot that keeps goals, decisions, constraints and open tasks, without losing the ability to check it.

4. Schema Design

   How to give the model's reply a fixed shape with JSON Schema, Markdown or Pydantic, add fields for confidence and missing information, and check every reply in a validation pipeline.