Ryan “RyMac” McKinney · USMC · 15 August 2026 · 5 minute read
Short answer, so you can leave if that is all you came for. Context engineering is deciding what your AI can see when it works. Almost every course sold under that name teaches a developer to build that decision in code. If you are the person who got handed the AI and you cannot write code, you do not need a course. You need a filing system, and it is 2 text files.
Context engineering is choosing what information an AI has in front of it at the moment it does a job.
That is the whole definition.
It is not prompting. Prompting is what you say. Context is what is on the desk while you say it.
Ask a new employee to price a job. If they have the price sheet, the last 3 quotes, and the note about which customer already argued about price, you get a good answer. If they have none of that, you get a confident guess.
Same person. Same question. The difference was what was in front of them.
Because the people who named the field were building software.
Go look at what comes up when you search for a course on this. Certificates. Framework tutorials. A module on retrieval pipelines. Something with a LangChain integration in week 3.
None of that is wrong. It is just written for somebody whose job is to build the system, not somebody whose job is to run a business that now has an AI in it.
That is the gap. Not knowledge. Translation.
You need to answer 3 questions, in order, every time your AI works on something.
1. Where does it look first? There has to be 1 file it always opens before it does anything. Not a prompt you retype. A file.
2. What are we doing right now? One more file that says the live job, the decisions already made, and where the material lives.
3. Where is the stuff? A folder. An actual folder, with the calls and drafts and client files in it.
A map, a desk, and a filing cabinet.
That is context engineering for a business owner. Everything else in those courses is implementation detail for people building the tools you already pay for.
~/business/ ├── CLAUDE.md <- the map. 11 lines. always read first ├── Context.md <- the desk. what we're doing today └── ops/ ├── clients/ ├── offers/ ├── sops/ └── archive/
That is the entire system. You could build it yourself in 10 minutes of right-clicking, which is exactly why I am not going to charge you for it.
There is a real method, and it is not mine.
It is called Interpretable Context Methodology, ICM for short. Jake Van Clief and David McDermott wrote the paper. The short version of their argument: your folder structure can carry the job that people currently write orchestration code to do.
Anthropic has published on context engineering too, and their framing agrees on the part that matters: the constraint is not how smart the model is, it is what you put in front of it.
If you want the full breakdown of the methodology itself, I wrote that up on my other site: what Interpretable Context Methodology actually is, in plain English.
I am the guy who runs it in public and shows the receipts.
I want to be fair here, because a straw man helps nobody.
A real context engineering course will teach you retrieval, chunking strategies, evaluation, and how to build memory into an application. If you are building a product that other people will use, learn all of it. Those are genuine skills and they are worth money.
You are probably not building a product. You are trying to stop re-explaining your own business to a chat window every morning.
Different problem. Much smaller answer.
Before you buy anything, run this.
Open a brand new AI session. Zero memory of you. Ask it where one of your projects stands.
If it finds the answer in 2 moves, your filing is sound and a course might genuinely be your next step.
If it cannot, no course is going to fix that. The information was never written down anywhere it could look.
Most setups fail that test. Mine failed it the first time too.
CLAUDE.md, Context.md, the folder skeleton, a 1-page setup sheet, and a teardown checklist for whatever you are already paying for. 20 minutes, start to finish. No card, no call, no 12 week cohort.
Send me the folder systemIf you want to watch it get built and argued about in public, including the parts that do not work, I am in my free community every day.