Context Engineering Has a Blind Spot

The biggest shift in agent design over the past year has been context engineering rather than improved models. Most of the published guidance focuses on codebases, documentation, and structured knowledge bases, and it's good guidance. But there's a category of enterprise data that breaks every standard context engineering pattern, and almost nobody is writing about it: email. Why email is different from everything else When Google's ADK team writes about context engineering, they describe a pipeline: ingest data, compile a view, serve it to the model. When Anthropic describes it, they talk about curating tokens for maximum utility. Both assume the source data has some structural integrity to work with, because a codebase has files, functions, and imports, a knowledge base has documents with authors and dates, and even Slack has channels and timestamps. Email has none of that. A 20-reply business thread contains the same quoted text duplicated up to 20 times, every email client quoting