Reference-grade guide to the engineering AROUND the model — the control loop, tools, memory, retries, and budgets (the harness) plus context as a dynamically-assembled token budget — covering lost-in-the-middle, context rot, just-in-time retrieval, compaction, sub-agent isolation, prompt-cache-stabl
Reference-grade guide to the engineering AROUND the model — the control loop, tools, memory, retries, and budgets (the harness) plus context as a dynamically-assembled token budget — covering lost-in-the-middle, context rot, just-in-time retrieval, compaction, sub-agent isolation, prompt-cache-stable ordering, and the agent-loop and eval patterns that actually determine reliability.