What Designing AI Agents Taught Me About Love
The context engineering hiding behind every “I love you”
Hello Neuro Evolution Community,
Happy Valentine’s Day Weekend!
I wasn’t planning to write about love this week. I was deep in the weeds of designing AI agents: building workflows, engineering context windows, orchestrating which data gets pulled from which database at exactly the right moment. Pretty unromantic stuff.
Then I was talking to my wife and before going back to tackle the next thing on my list, I said what I always say: “I love you.”
And it hit me. I’d been doing context engineering all day, professionally and personally, without realizing they were the same thing.
What Context Engineering Actually Is
Here’s the short version: when you design an AI agent, a system that can reason, use tools, and take action, the hardest challenge isn’t making it smart. It’s making sure the right information is present at the right moment in time.
Imagine a founder running a growing company. An AI agent supporting their decisions might need to pull real-time revenue data, combine it with cash flow projections, factor in upcoming payroll, and cross-reference market trends, all to surface a recommendation at the exact moment the founder needs it. Pull outdated numbers or forget a key variable? That one decision, made on incomplete context, can ripple across the entire business.
The beauty of a well-designed agent isn’t raw intelligence. It’s contextual awareness: knowing what matters, when it matters.
Sound familiar?
The “I Love You” Protocol
That “I love you” when you leave for work in the morning. The family photo on your desk. Your kid’s drawing pinned to the fridge. Your partner’s face as your phone wallpaper. The quick “thinking of you” text in the middle of a busy afternoon.
We don’t do these things because we forgot we love someone. We do them because love, like context, fades from active memory when life gets noisy.
Every “I love you” is a context refresh.
Every photo on your desk is persistent memory.
Every good night kiss is a way of saying: before this day closes out, let me reload what truly matters.
We’ve been engineering context our entire lives. We just called it love.
Why the Best Agents and the Best Relationships Run on the Same Principles
The principles that make AI agents effective are the same ones that make relationships thrive.
Timing matters. Calling the right service at the wrong time produces garbage results. In relationships, “I love you” whispered during a hard day lands completely differently than one mumbled while scrolling your phone. Same words. Different context.
Intentionality matters. Agents don’t magically know what’s relevant. Someone engineers the system to retrieve the right information at the right time. In our lives, if we don’t intentionally pull in reminders of what matters, the noise of deadlines, bills, and notifications will crowd it all out.
Context degrades. In AI, there’s a concept called context windows: a limit on how much a model can hold at once. Old information gets pushed out by new input. Our attention works the same way. If you stop refreshing, if you stop saying the words, stop making the calls, the signal gets lost in the noise.
The Meaning Might Be Simpler Than We Think
The deeper I go into designing these systems, the more I learn about myself. I keep coming back to one thought:
What if the meaning of life is really just about learning to love well?
Learning to love ourselves enough to grow. Learning to love others enough to stay intentional. Learning to love what we do enough to show up fully for ourselves, even when the odds are stacked against us. Learning to love our values enough to stand behind them when it’s inconvenient. And most importantly, learning to love the journey, even when we can’t see where it’s going.
That’s the ultimate context engineering. Keeping love loaded in your active memory, every single day, no matter how noisy the world gets.
Your Valentine’s Day Challenge
Audit your personal context. Look around your workspace, your phone, your daily routines. Are the reminders of what matters still working, or have they become invisible wallpaper? And just as important: what’s polluting your signal? What notifications, distractions, or habits are drowning out the things that actually matter?
Refresh one piece of context today. Send that text. Say those words out loud. Put up a new photo. Not because you forgot, but because the people you love deserve to be in your active memory, not your long-term storage.
Design your own “I love you” protocol. Just like a well-designed agent has scheduled context retrievals, build a small ritual that reloads what matters. Morning coffee together. A note in a lunchbox. A standing Wednesday call with your parents if you’re lucky enough to still have them, or your close friends. Make it a system, not an afterthought.
The best AI agents in the world are the ones that never lose sight of what’s relevant.
Shouldn’t we hold ourselves to the same standard?
Happy Valentine’s Day. Go engineer your context.
Stay curious, experiment, and let’s build the future together! 🧠🔍
Lots of love ❤️,
Nariman
🤯 Thank you for the timely message, Nariman!