A practitioner's guide to maximizing agent capabilities with minimal tooling — covering context management, sycophancy exploitation, task contracts, and iterative rules/skills architecture.

Six battle-tested context engineering principles from Manus's production agent — including KV-cache optimization, logit masking over tool removal, filesystem-as-memory, attention manipulation through todo recitation, preserving error traces, and breaking few-shot pattern imitation.

OpenAI's practical guide covering the three pillars of agent construction — choosing the right model, defining tools clearly, and writing effective instructions — with actionable advice on guardrails and evaluation.