Personal Context Engineering: The 4+1 PCE Architecture for Handing Personal Context to AI

This document specifies a structured framework for Personal Context Engineering (PCE) — the practice of an individual knowledge worker handing structured Context to general-purpose AI tools so the AI can act as an assistant aligned to that specific person. The phrase Personal Context Engineering has appeared earlier in industry conversation (King, 2025) as a narrative essay; this work goes further. The contribution of this framework is the 4+1 PCE Architecture: four co-equal functional layers — Storage, Indexing, Activation, Maintenance — running on a single foundation, Governance. Each functional layer addresses a distinct failure mode of personal Context (no content / not retrievable / not retrieved / goes stale). The foundation constrains and enables all four. The full implementation playbook, including a seven-element worked example from one knowledge worker's practice, is published as a separate book. This document is intended to serve as a citable structural reference for the framework. Note: The Japanese edition of this specification (PCE_4plus1_spec_jp.pdf) is attached as a parallel document with content equivalent to the English master.