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Context engineering is sleeping on the humble hyperlink

mbleigh.dev

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Re: Context engineering is sleeping on the humble hyperlink

#31

Post by JimDabell »

fellowniusmonk wrote: post #26
alexpetros wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I worked for a company that was all hateoas. In the formal sense, explicitly structured around the concept, not the sense that html has both data and actions via links, it worked, it was a real product, but it was slow and terrible to develop and debug. The web is also a real product, one that's (when not bloated with adtech) capable of being fast and easy to develop on. That other people have tried to do HATEOAS a…

I do just want to be clear because I'm not 100% following I don't think. You aren't saying hypermedia/hyperlinks served by a backend equal hateaos are you? hateaos is from 2000 isn't it? Long after hyperlinks and the web already existed.

REST / HATEOAS is basically one of the main architects of the web saying “these are the things we did that made the web work so well”. So yes, REST was published after the web already existed, but no that doesn’t mean that the web is not REST / HATEOAS.

Re: Context engineering is sleeping on the humble hyperlink

#32

Post by ako »

The article seems a few months too late. Claude (and others) are already doing this: i've been instructing claude code to generate code following certain best practices provided through URLs or asking it to compare certain approaches from different URLs. Claude Skill uses file "URLs" to provide progressive disclosure: only include detailed texts into the context if needed. This helps reduce context size, and improves cachability.

Re: Context engineering is sleeping on the humble hyperlink

#33

Post by fellowniusmonk »

dragonwriter wrote: post #29
fellowniusmonk wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do just want to be clear because I'm not 100% following I don't think. You aren't saying hypermedia/hyperlinks served by a backend equal hateaos are you? hateaos is from 2000 isn't it? Long after hyperlinks and the web already existed.

REST, including HATEOAS, was largely retrospective documentation of the architectural underpinning of the WWW by Roy Fielding (who played an important role in web technology from 1993 on, was the co-lead for the HTTP/1.0 spec, the lead for the original HTTP/1.1 spec, and also, IIRC, lead or co-lead on the original URL spec. The things it documented existed before it documented them.

Thanks. Appreciate it.

Re: Context engineering is sleeping on the humble hyperlink

#34

Post by mettamage »

ako wrote: post #32

The article seems a few months too late. Claude (and others) are already doing this: i've been instructing claude code to generate code following certain best practices provided through URLs or asking it to compare certain approaches from different URLs. Claude Skill uses file "URLs" to provide progressive disclosure: only include detailed texts into the context if needed. This helps reduce context size, and improves…

Thanks for that. Comments like yours are why I visit this site and don’t have to read the original article.

Though in this case, I did read the original article.

Re: Context engineering is sleeping on the humble hyperlink

#36

Post by mbleigh »

ako wrote: post #32

The article seems a few months too late. Claude (and others) are already doing this: i've been instructing claude code to generate code following certain best practices provided through URLs or asking it to compare certain approaches from different URLs. Claude Skill uses file "URLs" to provide progressive disclosure: only include detailed texts into the context if needed. This helps reduce context size, and improves…

Heh, the problem with having a half drafted post on your machine for a few weeks is the industry moves fast!

I had the post pretty much done, went on vacation for a week, and Claude Skills came out in the interim.

That being said Skills are indeed an implementation of the patterns possible with linking, but they are narrower in scope than what's possible even with MCP Resources if they were properly made available to agents (e.g. dynamic construction of context based on environment and/or fetching from remote sources).

Re: Context engineering is sleeping on the humble hyperlink

#37

Post by mbleigh »

JimDabell wrote: post #24
mbleigh wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree, the web itself is absolutely HATEOAS, but there was a type of person in the 2000s era who insisted that APIs were not truly RESTful if they weren't also hypermedia APIs, but the only real benefit of those APIs was to enable overly generic API clients that were usually strictly worse than even clumsily tailored custom clients. The missing piece was having machines that could handle enough ambiguity to "…

> there was a type of person in the 2000s era who insisted that APIs were not truly RESTful if they weren't also hypermedia APIs The creator of REST, Roy Fielding, literally said this loud and clear: > REST APIs must be hypertext-driven > What needs to be done to make the REST architectural style clear on the notion that hypertext is a constraint? In other words, if the engine of application state (and hence the API)…

Fair, but the person who coins a term generally doesn't ultimately decide how it's going to be used, see vibe coding for a more recent example.

REST API became colloquially defined as "HTTP API with hierarchical URL structure, usually JSON". I wrote about the very phenomenon 15 years ago! https://www.mobomo.com/2010/04/rest-isnt-what-you-think-it-i...

Re: Context engineering is sleeping on the humble hyperlink

#38

Post by fooker »

ako wrote: post #32

The article seems a few months too late. Claude (and others) are already doing this: i've been instructing claude code to generate code following certain best practices provided through URLs or asking it to compare certain approaches from different URLs. Claude Skill uses file "URLs" to provide progressive disclosure: only include detailed texts into the context if needed. This helps reduce context size, and improves…

It silently fails to work, very often. Anthropomorphizing a bit, it just won't follow the link, and make you think that it did.

Not an exact science yet.

Re: Context engineering is sleeping on the humble hyperlink

#39

Post by j45 »

ako wrote: post #32

The article seems a few months too late. Claude (and others) are already doing this: i've been instructing claude code to generate code following certain best practices provided through URLs or asking it to compare certain approaches from different URLs. Claude Skill uses file "URLs" to provide progressive disclosure: only include detailed texts into the context if needed. This helps reduce context size, and improves…

That's fair, but not everyone reads and tries every single AI thing every day, or they might not get to applying it.

Re: Context engineering is sleeping on the humble hyperlink

#40

Post by xg15 »

HATEOAS always seemed a bit like a solution in search of a problem to me. It was a nice idea for more convenient "manual exploration" of APIs if you're a human developer and all you have is curl - but I never understood for what kind of "production" scenario they were designing their constraints. The kind of automated client that could make actual use of the metadata always seemed more of a fantasy.

...until now. It seems they finally found their problem.

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