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Concepts

Understanding the why behind anchor helps you use the library effectively and extend it with confidence. These pages cover the foundational ideas, the system architecture, and the contracts that make everything pluggable.

  • Context Engineering


    The philosophy of treating context as a first-class engineering problem -- why "just stuff it in the prompt" doesn't scale.

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  • Architecture


    The 6-stage pipeline that transforms a raw query into a fully assembled, token-budgeted context window.

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  • Protocols


    PEP 544 structural subtyping for every extension point -- bring your own retriever, memory, formatter, or store without inheriting a base class.

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  • Token Budgets


    Per-source allocation, overflow tracking, and priority-based eviction to keep your context window within model limits.

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