This article is a year-end recap from Towards Data Science (TDS) highlighting the most popular articles published in 2025. The year was heavily focused on AI Agents and their development, with significant interest in related frameworks like MCP and contextual engineering. Beyond agents, Python remained a crucial skill for data professionals, and there was a strong emphasis on career development within the field. The recap also touches on the evolution of RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) into more sophisticated context-aware systems and the importance of optimizing LLM (Large Language Model) costs. TDS also celebrated its growth as an independent publication and its Author Payment
This article explores strategies for effectively curating and managing the context that powers AI agents, discussing the shift from prompt engineering to context engineering and techniques for optimizing context usage in LLMs.
