⛔STOP calling everything context.

The industry is confusing history, knowledge, and trace with context.
And it is creating a mess.

Suddenly everything is called context.

Logs are context.
Documents are context.
Conversation history is context.
Decision traces are context.
Embeddings are context.

Dump it all into a graph and call it context engineering.

This is not context.

It is a bag of artifacts.

Because three completely different things are being mixed together.

🔹History: What happened before.
• events
• logs
• past interactions
• decision traces

➡️ History explains the past.
It does not define the current situation.

🔹Knowledge: How decisions should be made.
• policies
• rules
• decision models
• optimization logic

➡️ Knowledge describes the domain and defines how a decision should work.
It is not the current situation either.

🔹 Decision Trace: What happened during the decision.
• inputs used
• reasoning steps
• intermediate results
• final outcome

➡️ Decision trace explains how the decision was made.

None of these are context.

💡 Context is the information available about the subject at the moment the decision is made. It defines the situation.


Follow the “Uncle of DI” if you're looking for unfiltered insights into #DecisionIntelligence, #AI, and #DecisionAutomation. Hit the 🔔 on my profile to get notified about my daily posts.

Posted here.

Published March 17th, 2026 at 07:30 am