Context Engineering: Building the Knowledge Engine AI Agents Need

QCon London 2026

Sponsored session

Context Engineering: Building the Knowledge Engine AI Agents Need

Monday Mar 16 / 05:05PM GMT, Westminster (4th Fl.) at The QEII Centre, London

Abstract

Every AI coding tool can generate code. Very few can generate the right code for your organization — because they're missing context. They don't know why your team chose Redis over DynamoDB, what the team decided in a Slack thread from two months ago about the auth migration, or which architectural patterns your principal engineers actually enforce in review.

This talk is a practitioner's guide to building a context engine: the reasoning layer that continuously synthesizes organizational knowledge across disparate sources into unified, queryable understanding. I'll walk through the problems you actually have to solve — reasoning across systems that don't agree with each other, searching globally before you can reason, maintaining identity-scoped permissions so every user and agent only sees what they should, and personalizing results based on who's asking and what they're working on. These are the engineering challenges that make naive RAG fall short, drawn from real lessons building this at scale.

Includes a live demo showing the same coding task with and without organizational context, and an honest look at what we got wrong along the way.

Sponsored session

Session sponsored by

Give your AI tools the context they're missing. Unblocked surfaces the context developers and agents need to generate reliable code, reviews, and answers.

76% senior dev or higher
1:11 speaker ratio
60+ practitioners

QCon London 2026 is a three day conference for senior software engineers, architects and team leads. An international program committee of working engineers selects every session. Patterns and practices, not products and pitches.

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