Gen AI Products Are Context Management Products

As autonomy increases, so must context sophistication - the agent must infer what the user no longer provides.

A Gen AI product fundamentally excels at one core function: Context Management.

The more precisely you can infer and enrich the prompt with specific guidance, the better the application’s performance.

A CoPilot, like GitHub’s, leverages user cues - such as open files in the editor, the current function being written, and the parsed AST - to embed useful context.

A chat application like ChatGPT uses chat history, summaries of prior conversations, and knowledge from other sessions to enhance user interactions.

For autonomous agents, the primary challenge is achieving this in the background with minimal user intervention. This requires a deep understanding of core structures within your domain.