Context Engineering 2.0: The Context of Context Engineering

Karl Marx once wrote that “the human essence is the ensemble of social relations”, suggesting that individuals are not isolated entities, but are fundamentally shaped by their interactions with other entities --- within which contexts play a constitutive and essential role. With the advent of computers and artificial intelligence, these contexts are no longer limited to purely human-human interactions: human-machine interactions are included as well. Then a central question emerges: How can machines better understand our situations and purposes? To address this challenge, researchers have recently ``developed'' the concept of context engineering. Although it is often regarded as a recent innovation of the agent era, in fact, we argue that related practices can be traced back to over 20 years ago. Since the early 1990s, it has evolved through distinct historical phases, each shaped by its intelligence level of machines: from early human-computer interaction (HCI) frameworks built around primitive computers, to today’s human-agent interaction (HAI) paradigms driven by intelligent agents, and potentially to human-level or even superhuman intelligence in the future. In this paper, we discuss the context of context engineering, provide a systematic definition, outline our perspective on its historical and conceptual landscape, and examine key design considerations for its practice. By addressing these questions, we aim to offer a conceptual foundation for context engineering and sketch its promising future. This paper serves as a stepping stone for a broader community effort toward systematic context engineering in AI systems.