What is Context assembly?
Verified 5 August 2026
The step between retrieval and generation, and the one that most determines answer quality. Deduplicate, assess trust, rank, and cut to budget — usually implemented as bespoke application code that nobody revisits.
Doing it server-side lets the engine use signals the application does not have, such as corroboration counts across rejected duplicates. Attaching a reason to each included passage makes the selection explainable, which matters when an answer has to be defended.
How unlob handles this: assemble_context
Common questions
What is Context assembly?
Context assembly selects, orders and truncates retrieved passages to fit a token budget before they enter a model’s context.
How does Context assembly work in practice?
Doing it server-side lets the engine use signals the application does not have, such as corroboration counts across rejected duplicates. Attaching a reason to each included passage makes the selection explainable, which matters when an answer has to be defended.
See it working
The free tier is 10,000 requests a month with no card — enough to test any of this against your own queries.