Course outline for Context Engineering and Context Graphs

Module 1: Model the situation, not every fact

• Context vs knowledge: Separate stable domain facts from task-specific evidence, current workflow state, and historical decisions needed for one review.
• Context graphs: Connect task-relevant facts with source, time, and access constraints without treating every available relationship as necessary context.
• Activity graphs: Represent historical actions and decisions separately from stable knowledge and execution dependencies, preserving what happened rather than rewriting history.

Practical outcome: Separate stable facts, current workflow state, and historical activity in a synthetic project-review graph.

Module 2: Qualify sources and temporal meaning

• Provenance: Attach source identifiers and versions to included facts so each context item can be checked against its evidence.
• Temporal context: Distinguish historical decision snapshots from current information, applying freshness limits while flagging stale evidence and conflicting sources.
• User context: Select role-relevant information under supplied access rules and exclude prohibited personal fields from the task package.

Practical outcome: Attach source/version/time/access fields and define freshness, conflicting-source, and prohibited-data rules.

Module 3: Assemble and recover stage context

• Workflow context: Specify the current stage, required facts, and next permitted step instead of assembling an unrestricted project history.
• Context retrieval: Retrieve bounded fresh evidence under source-precedence, relevance, access, and package-size rules, exposing unresolved conflicts rather than hiding them.
• Context construction for agents: Build a stage-scoped manifest that supports fresh-session reconstruction while retaining source versions and the separate historical decision view.

Practical outcome: Build a stage-scoped context manifest and reconstruct the decision in a fresh session without replacing its historical snapshot.

Practical exercise

• Produce a context graph and manifest for a synthetic daily review using logs, calendar entries, and messages.
• Include required fresh evidence; exclude an irrelevant record and a prohibited field, and flag a stale or conflicting source.
• Check every included fact against its source identifier and version, and enforce the supplied package-size budget.
• Start with an empty session or worksheet and reconstruct the next permitted step solely from the manifest; compare historical and current decision views.