Frameworks · AI Don't Fix Stupidity

The Five-Layer Context Hierarchy

An agent is only as good as the context it stands on. The author's integrated formulation organises that context into five layers.

Context is the one part of the architecture the business rather than IT must own. Each layer has a named owner. "You can buy scaffolding for the top layer; the content of all five is yours, and the lower four can only be earned inside the organisation." Fine-tuning does not create a context layer; facts, policy and authority boundaries stay explicit, versioned and outside the model's weights. Live transactional data sits outside the hierarchy, behind governed tools. The ownership model drives build versus buy, with one rule underneath: "never buy the context layer." The book also names the role that does this work, the context engineer.