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The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering

philschmid.de

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Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering

#11

Post by 4ndrewl »

bGl2YW5j wrote: post #5

Saw this the other day and it made me think that too much effort and credence is being given to this idea of crafting the perfect environment for LLMs to thrive in. Which to me, is contrary to how powerful AI systems should function. We shouldn’t need to hold its hand so much. Obviously we’ve got to tame the version of LLMs we’ve got now, and this kind of thinking is a step in the right direction. What I take issue w…

Reminds me of first gen chatbots where the user had to put in the effort of trying to craft a phrase in a way that would garner the expected result. It's a form of user-hostility.

Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering

#12

Post by ModernMech »

"Wow, AI will replace programming languages by allowing us to code in natural language!"

"Actually, you need to engineer the prompt to be very precise about what you want to AI to do."

"Actually, you also need to add in a bunch of "context" so it can disambiguate your intent."

"Actually English isn't a good way to express intent and requirements, so we have introduced protocols to structure your prompt, and various keywords to bring attention to specific phrases."

"Actually, these meta languages could use some more features and syntax so that we can better express intent and requirements without ambiguity."

"Actually... wait we just reinvented the idea of a programming language."

Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering

#13

Post by TacticalCoder »

bGl2YW5j wrote: post #5

Saw this the other day and it made me think that too much effort and credence is being given to this idea of crafting the perfect environment for LLMs to thrive in. Which to me, is contrary to how powerful AI systems should function. We shouldn’t need to hold its hand so much. Obviously we’ve got to tame the version of LLMs we’ve got now, and this kind of thinking is a step in the right direction. What I take issue w…

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Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering

#15

Post by whimsicalism »

i think context engineering as described is somewhat a subset of ‘environment engineering.’ the gold-standard is when an outcome reached with tools can be verified as correct and hillclimbed with RL. most of the engineering effort is from building the environment and verifier while the nuts and bolts of grpo/ppo training and open-weight tool-using models are commodities.

Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering

#16

Post by [deleted] »

JohnMakin wrote: post #10

> Building powerful and reliable AI Agents is becoming less about finding a magic prompt or model updates. Ok, I can buy this > It is about the engineering of context and providing the right information and tools, in the right format, at the right time. when the "right" format and "right" time are essentially, and maybe even necessarily, undefined, then aren't you still reaching for a "magic" solution? If the definit…

[deleted]

Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering

#18

Post by smeej »

ramesh31 wrote: post #8
bGl2YW5j wrote: post #5

Saw this the other day and it made me think that too much effort and credence is being given to this idea of crafting the perfect environment for LLMs to thrive in. Which to me, is contrary to how powerful AI systems should function. We shouldn’t need to hold its hand so much. Obviously we’ve got to tame the version of LLMs we’ve got now, and this kind of thinking is a step in the right direction. What I take issue w…

We shouldn't but it's analogous to how CPU usage used to work. In the 8 bit days you could do some magical stuff that was completely impossible before microcomputers existed. But you had to have all kinds of tricks and heuristics to work around the limited abilities. We're in the same place with LLMs now. Some day we will have the equivalent of what gigabytes or RAM are to a modern CPU now, but we're still stuck in t…

It also reminds me of when you could structure an internet search query and find exactly what you wanted. You just had to ask it in the machine's language.

I hope the generalized future of this doesn't look like the generalized future of that, though. Now it's darn near impossible to find very specific things on the internet because the search engines will ignore any "operators" you try to use if they generate "too few" results (by which they seem to mean "few enough that no one will pay for us to show you an ad for this search"). I'm moderately afraid the ability to get useful results out of AIs will be abstracted away to some lowest common denominator of spammy garbage people want to "consume" instead of use for something.

Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering

#19

Post by edwardbernays »

JohnMakin wrote: post #10

> Building powerful and reliable AI Agents is becoming less about finding a magic prompt or model updates. Ok, I can buy this > It is about the engineering of context and providing the right information and tools, in the right format, at the right time. when the "right" format and "right" time are essentially, and maybe even necessarily, undefined, then aren't you still reaching for a "magic" solution? If the definit…

The state of the art theoretical frameworks typically separates these into two distinct exploratory and discovery phases. The first phase, which is exploratory, is best conceptualized as utilizing an atmospheric dispersion device. An easily identifiable marker material, usually a variety of feces, is metaphorically introduced at high velocity. The discovery phase is then conceptualized as analyzing the dispersal patterns of the exploratory phase. These two phases are best summarized, respectively, as "Fuck Around" followed by "Find Out."

Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering

#20

Post by throwawayoldie »

ModernMech wrote: post #12

"Wow, AI will replace programming languages by allowing us to code in natural language!" "Actually, you need to engineer the prompt to be very precise about what you want to AI to do." "Actually, you also need to add in a bunch of "context" so it can disambiguate your intent." "Actually English isn't a good way to express intent and requirements, so we have introduced protocols to structure your prompt, and various k…

Only without all that pesky determinism and reproducibility.

(Whoever's about to say "well ackshually temperature of zero", don't.)

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