This rings very true to me, and it's why I've been mildly obsessed for a decade plus with how to share mental models between people, and now LLMs, of any domain, be it technical, commercial, scientific or anything else. My inspiration was a book called Learning How To Learn by Novak, which TBH is so dry I'm not sure anyone I've recommended it to has actually finished it :) So then I point them to a talk here:
https://www.infoq.com/presentations/concept-map/
and an app to help render the shared mental model in plain text accessible to the LLM while providing visual interactivity to the humans here:
https://thinkingtools.software/concepticon/
It is interesting to compare this to LLMs - they also have the bounded context that you can see as the analogue to our working memory. It can contain enormously more bits of information than the 4 things the article says is the capacity of our working memory - but the 4 things can probably be much more complex internally - they are more like 4 pointers probably.
But at some level context engineering is very similar to what this article talks about.
But at some level context engineering is very similar to what this article talks about.