Context engineering: where it goes next

Trend note, written 2026-05-12. I'll mark this as out of date if it doesn't hold up.

The bet

The phrase "prompt engineering" is collapsing into "context engineering" over the next 12 months. Both will exist; one will become the load-bearing skill.

What I'm seeing

Every AI tool that mattered in 2024 was a chat box. Every AI tool that matters in 2026 has at least one persistent context layer:

  • Cursor — project context, sidebar history, AGENTS.md
  • Claude Projects — project files, project instructions, scoped memory
  • ChatGPT — GPTs, memory, project workspaces
  • Codex CLI — AGENTS.md, conversation transcripts
  • Claude Code — CLAUDE.md, hooks, MCP servers

They all converged on the same primitive: shaped, persistent context that lives outside the live conversation. The thing that varies between them is how you shape it, where it lives, and which AI can read it.

Why this matters for mdfy

The convergence is the wedge. If shaped context is the new primitive, then a portable shape — one URL that every tool reads — is structurally valuable. AI companies can't build it because their incentive is the wall. The third party can.

The risk

The big AI companies could decide to interoperate. Anthropic and OpenAI could agree on a common context format. If that happens, mdfy's "we make context portable" pitch is weaker.

Why I don't think that's the world we're in

  • The wall is the business model. OpenAI's revenue comes from people staying inside ChatGPT. Anthropic's comes from people staying inside Claude. Neither has a structural reason to make context portable across providers.
  • MCP is the closest they've come. And MCP is a tool-call protocol, not a memory protocol. It doesn't make context portable; it makes individual function calls callable from multiple hosts.

What I'd do differently if I'm wrong

If the AI companies do interoperate, mdfy still has a wedge: authored context, where the user writes what they want preserved. The portable layer is the easier win, but the authoring layer doesn't depend on portability surviving.