Context-Engineering

Your agent is not slow because it has too many tools. It is paying three separate bills — a resident attention tax charged every turn, a compaction debt charged by the fix, and a measurement illusion that hides whether the capability package was worth anything. A cited accounting of all three, and a decision procedure keyed to which one you are actually paying.

METR’s RCT found AI made developers 19% slower—yet they refused to work without it. The paradox reveals a deeper truth: when AI handles execution, human cognition must migrate upstream to specification, context design, and judgment. A framework grounded in cognitive science and HCI research.