AI Agents: Your Messy Code is Killing Your Context Window

Dev.to AI
Generative AI

We spend thousands of dollars on tokens and hours tweaking system prompts, but the truth is often simpler: Most context windows are bloated because our software architecture is a mess. I’ve been obsessed with Context Engineering lately, and one pattern keeps delivering insane results: applying "Old School" Software Engineering to "New School" AI. The Problem: The "Everything Everywhere" Prompt We often treat agents like junior devs and throw a 10-page Wiki at them because our codebases are tangled. When the agent doesn't understand a function, we add documentation.