Aug 17, 2026

Context Engineering in 2026 — Louis-François Bouchard, Omar Solano & Samridhi Vaid, Towards AI

Experiments with an AI tutor reveal that not compacting context often outperforms summarization, leading to better recall, lower cost, and faster responses, primarily due to LLM API prompt caching. Compaction invalidates the cache, making it unexpectedly expensive. While cloud environments benefit from full history, local hardware limits necessitate compaction, highlighting the need to prioritize actual constraints over default compaction strategies.

Jun 28, 2026

We Cut 94% of AI Coding Tokens With a Local Code Index - Rajkumar Sakthivel, Tesco

Rajkumar Sakthivel details how an unexpected surge in AI coding tool costs led to the discovery that sending excessive, irrelevant context was the primary culprit. He introduces the Code Context Engine (CCE), a local retrieval layer that intelligently prunes context using AST-aware chunks, hybrid search, and relevance scoring, resulting in up to 94% token reduction and significant cost savings. The talk emphasizes that optimizing input context, not just the AI model, is paramount for efficient and accurate AI-assisted coding.

Jul 27, 2025

Information Retrieval from the Ground Up - Philipp Krenn, Elastic

Philipp Krenn from Elastic demystifies the 'R' in RAG, arguing that modern retrieval is a sophisticated blend of classic keyword search (like BM25) and modern vector search. This workshop explores the fundamentals of lexical analysis, scoring, dense/sparse vectors, and advanced hybrid search techniques like Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF).