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.

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

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

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