Here I was thinking that part of Prompt Engineering is understanding context and awareness for other yada yada.
The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
181–190 of 550 posts
Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with you, but would echo OP's concern, in a way that makes me feel like a party pooper, but, is open about what I see us all expressing squeamish-ness about. It is somewhat bothersome to have another buzz phrase. I don't why we are doing this, other than there was a Xeet from the Shopify CEO, QT'd approvingly by Karpathy, then its written up at length, and tied to another set of blog posts. To wit, it went fr…
Sometimes buzzwords turn out to be mirages that disappear in a few weeks, but often they stick around. I find they takeoff when someone crystallizes something many people are thinking about internally, and don’t realize everyone else is having similar thoughts. In this example, I think the way agent and app builders are wrestling with LLMs is fundamentally different than chatbots users (it’s closer to programming), a…
I agree - what distinguishes this is how rushed and self-aware it is. It is being pushed top down, sheepishly.
EDIT: Ah, you also wrote the blog posts tied to this. It gives 0 comfort that you have a blog post re: building buzz phrases in 2020, rather, it enhances the awkward inorganic rush people are self-aware of.
Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
#183Surely Jim is also using an agent. Jim can't be worth having a quick sync with if he's not using his own agent! So then why are these two agents emailing each other back and forth using bizarre, terse office jargon?
Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
#184I have felt somewhat frustrated with what I perceive as a broad tendency to malign "prompt engineering" as an antiquated approach for whatever new the industry technique is with regards to building a request body for a model API. Whether that's RAG years ago, nuance in a model request's schema beyond simple text (tool calls, structured outputs, etc), or concepts of agentic knowledge and memory more recently. While mo…
I liked what Andrej Karpathy had to say about this: https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1937902205765607626 > [..] in every industrial-strength LLM app, context engineering is the delicate art and science of filling the context window with just the right information for the next step. Science because doing this right involves task descriptions and explanations, few shot examples, RAG, related (possibly multimodal) da…
All that work just for stripping a license. If one uses code directly from GitHub, copy and paste is sufficient. One can even keep the license.
Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've seen a lot of cases where, if you look at the context you're giving the model and imagine giving it to a human (just not yourself or your coworker, someone who doesn't already know what you're trying to achieve - think mechanical turk), the human would be unlikely to give the output you want. Context is often incomplete, unclear, contradictory, or just contains too much distracting information. Those are all thi…
Alternatively, I've gotten exactly what I wanted from an LLM by giving it information that would not be enough for a human to work with, knowing that the llm is just going to fill in the gaps anyway. It's easy to forget that the conversation itself is what the LLM is helping to create. Humans will ignore or depriotitize extra information. They also need the extra information to get an idea of what you're looking for…
Yeah, it's definitely not a human! But it is often the case in my experience that problems in your context are quite obvious once looked at through a human lens.
Maybe not very often in a chat context, my experience is in trying to build agents.
Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with you, but would echo OP's concern, in a way that makes me feel like a party pooper, but, is open about what I see us all expressing squeamish-ness about. It is somewhat bothersome to have another buzz phrase. I don't why we are doing this, other than there was a Xeet from the Shopify CEO, QT'd approvingly by Karpathy, then its written up at length, and tied to another set of blog posts. To wit, it went fr…
The way I see it we're trying to rebrand because the term "prompt engineering" got redefined to mean "typing prompts full of stupid hacks about things like tipping and dead grandmas into a chatbot".
It helps that the rebrand may lead some people to believe that there are actually new and better inputs into the system rather than just more elaborate sandcastles built in someone else's sandbox.
Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
#187I feel like this is incredibly obvious to anyone who's ever used an LLM or has any concept of how they work. It was equally obvious before this that the "skill" of prompt-engineering was a bunch of hacks that would quickly cease to matter. Basically they have the raw intelligence, you now have to give them the ability to get input and the ability to take actions as output and there's a lot of plumbing to make that happen.
Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those issues are considered artifacts of the current crop of LLMs in academic circles; there is already research allowing LLMs to use millions of different tools at the same time, and stable long contexts, likely reducing the amount of agents to one for most use cases outside interfacing different providers. Anyone basing their future agentic systems on current LLMs would likely face LangChain fate - built for GPT-3,…
How would "a million different tool calls at the same time" work? For instance, MCP is HTTP based, even at low latency in incredibly parallel environments that would take forever.
MCPs aren't the only way to embed tool calls into an LLM
Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
We should be so far past the "grand debate about its usefulness" at this point. If you think that's still a debate, you might be listening to the small pool of very loud people who insist nothing has improved since the release of GPT-4.
Have you considered the opposite? Reflected on your own biases? I’m listening to my own experience. Just today I gave it another fair shot. GitHub Copilot agent mode with GPT-4.1. Still unimpressed. This is a really insightful look at why people perceive the usefulness of these models differently. It is fair to both sides without being dismissive as one side just not “getting it” or how we should be “so far” past deb…
Do either of these impress you?
https://alexgaynor.net/2025/jun/20/serialize-some-der/ - using Claude Code to compose and have a PR accepted into llvm that implements a compiler optimization (more of my notes here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/30/llvm/ )
https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2025/6/21/my-first-ai-library/ - Claude Code for writing and shipping a full open source library that handles sloppy (hah) invalid XML
Examples from the past two weeks, both from expert software engineers.
Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
#190Honestly, GPT-4o is all we ever needed to build a complete human-like reasoning system.
I am leading a small team working on a couple of “hard” problems to put the limits of LLMs to the test.
One is an options trader. Not algo / HFT, but simply doing due diligence, monitoring the news and making safe long-term bets.
Another is an online research and purchasing experience for residential real-estate.
Both these tasks, we’ve realized, you don’t even need a reasoning model. In fact, reasoning models are harder to get consistent results from.
What you need is a knowledge base infrastructure and pub-sub for updates. Amortize the learned knowledge across users and you have collaborative self-learning system that exhibits intelligence beyond any one particular user and is agnostic to the level of prompting skills they have.
Stay tuned for a limited alpha in this space. And DM if you’re interested.