Context Engineering 2026: LangGraph & Letta Token Budgets
Learn context engineering in 2026: LangGraph and Letta token budgets, why prompt stuffing fails at million-token scale, and how to build agents that remember.
Chapter 1: From Prompt Stuffing to Context Engineering: Why 2026 Changed the Rules For about three years, the dominant strategy for improving LLM applications was embarrassingly simple: put more stuff in the prompt. Retrieval not working? Bump top_k from 5 to 20. Agent forgetting things? Append the whole conversation. Model hallucinating about your API? Paste the entire OpenAPI spec. This worked well enough, often enough, that it became the default reflex — and it earned a name that its practitioners never used but everyone else recognized: prompt stuffing. Then the windows got big. Really big. Million-token context is now table...