Context is the new code: The context development lifecycle

The context that drives AI coding agents has become the primary lever determining what gets built, yet we treat it like we treated infrastructure in 2005: artisanal, unversioned, untested, and invisible.

That has to change. The context development lifecycle (Generate, Evaluate, Distribute, Observe) gives us the stages. The engineering practices that wrap around it include version control, peer review, CI/CD pipelines, and team workflows that make context a shared responsibility rather than individual prompt-craft.