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.

• CoPilot (like GitHub’s) leverages user cues - open files in the editor, the current function being written, the parsed AST - to embed useful context
• Chat applications (like ChatGPT) use chat history, summaries of prior conversations, and knowledge from other sessions to enhance interactions
• Autonomous agents face the hardest version of this problem - achieving context in the background with minimal user intervention, requiring deep understanding of core structures within your domain