parsimony

I always thought a business book repeating one idea was just padding. The economics says I was right about that. Years of explaining things to people showed I was only half right.

Text generation became free, so volume stopped signaling quality. Less documentation, written where the tools look, in directive vocabulary, under constant relevance audit — works better for both humans and LLMs.

Context engineering for dialogue systems: how ExoChat applies the principle of parsimony so every LLM turn gets only the context it needs.

The Principle of Parsimony in Context Engineering is a design rule for LLM prompts and context: formulate instructions and select artifacts in the minimum sufficient number of tokens that ensure unambiguous task interpretation, reserving the remaining token budget for the most valuable elements.