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

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

#141

Post by refulgentis »

simonw wrote: post #106
risyachka wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“A month-long skill” after which it won’t be a thing anymore, like so many other.

Most of the LLM prompting skills I figured out ~three years ago are still useful to me today. Even the ones that I've dropped are useful because I know that things that used to be helpful aren't helpful any more, which helps me build an intuition for how the models have improved over time.

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 from "buzzphrase" to "skill that'll probably be useful in 3 years still" over the course of this thread.

Has it even been a week since the original tweet?

There doesn't seem to be a strong foundation here, but due to the reach potential of the names involved, and their insistence on this being a thing while also indicating they're sheepish it is a thing, it will now be a thing.

Smacks of a self-aware version of Jared Friedman's tweet re: watching the invention of "Founder Mode" was like a startup version of the Potsdam Conference. (which sorted out Earth post-WWII. and he was not kidding. I could not even remember the phrase for the life of me. Lasted maybe 3 months?)

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

#142

Post by _carbyau_ »

old_man_cato wrote: post #88
simonw wrote: post #3

I wrote a bit about this the other day: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/27/context-engineering/ Drew Breunig has been doing some fantastic writing on this subject - coincidentally at the same time as the "context engineering" buzzword appeared but actually unrelated to that meme. How Long Contexts Fail - https://www.dbreunig.com/2025/06/22/how-contexts-fail-and-ho... - talks about the various ways in which longer…

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

#143

Post by simonw »

refulgentis wrote: post #141
simonw wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the LLM prompting skills I figured out ~three years ago are still useful to me today. Even the ones that I've dropped are useful because I know that things that used to be helpful aren't helpful any more, which helps me build an intuition for how the models have improved over time.

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".

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

#144

Post by dbreunig »

simonw wrote: post #106
risyachka wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“A month-long skill” after which it won’t be a thing anymore, like so many other.

Most of the LLM prompting skills I figured out ~three years ago are still useful to me today. Even the ones that I've dropped are useful because I know that things that used to be helpful aren't helpful any more, which helps me build an intuition for how the models have improved over time.

While researching the above posts Simon linked, I was struck by how many of these techniques came from the pre-ChatGPT era. NLP researchers have been dealing with this for awhile.

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

#145

Post by nimish »

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…

A half baked programming language that isn't deterministic or reproducible or guaranteed to do what you want. Worst of all worlds unless your input and output domains are tolerant to that, which most aren't. But if they are, then it's great

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

#146

Post by Zopieux »

jumploops wrote: post #75

To anyone who has worked with LLMs extensively, this is obvious. Single prompts can only get you so far (surprisingly far actually, but then they fall over quickly). This is actually the reason I built my own chat client (~2 years ago), because I wanted to “fork” and “prune” the context easily; using the hosted interfaces was too opaque. In the age of (working) tool-use, this starts to resemble agents calling sub-age…

I find it hilarious that this is how the original GPT3 UI worked, if you remember, and we're now discussing of reinventing the wheel.

A big textarea, you plug in your prompt, click generate, the completions are added in-line in a different color. You could edit any part, or just append, and click generate again.

90% of contemporary AI engineering these days is reinventing well understood concepts "but for LLMs", or in this case, workarounds for the self-inflicted chat-bubble UI. aistudio makes this slightly less terrible with its edit button on everything, but still not ideal.

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

#147

Post by timr »

simonw wrote: post #87
jcon321 wrote: post #81

I thought this entire premise was obvious? Does it really take an article and a venn diagram to say you should only provide the relevant content to your LLM when asking a question?

"Relevant content to your LLM when asking a question" is last year's RAG. If you look at how sophisticated current LLM systems work there is so much more to this. Just one example: Microsoft open sourced VS Code Copilot Chat today (MIT license). Their prompts are dynamically assembled with tool instructions for various tools based on whether or not they are enabled: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-copilot-chat/bl…

I get what you're saying, but the parent is correct -- most of this stuff is pretty obvious if you spend even an hour thinking about the problem.

For example, while the specifics of the prompts you're highlighting are unique to Copilot, I've basically implemented the same ideas on a project I've been working on, because it was clear from the limitations of these models that sooner rather than later it was going to be necessary to pick and choose amongst tools.

LLM "engineering" is mostly at the same level of technical sophistication that web work was back when we were using CGI with Perl -- "hey guys, what if we make the webserver embed the app server in a subprocess?" "Genius!"

I don't mean that in a negative way, necessarily. It's just...seeing these "LLM thought leaders" talk about this stuff in thinkspeak is a bit like getting a Zed Shaw blogpost from 2007, but fluffed up like SICP.

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

#148

Post by jknoepfler »

old_man_cato wrote: post #88
simonw wrote: post #3

I wrote a bit about this the other day: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/27/context-engineering/ Drew Breunig has been doing some fantastic writing on this subject - coincidentally at the same time as the "context engineering" buzzword appeared but actually unrelated to that meme. How Long Contexts Fail - https://www.dbreunig.com/2025/06/22/how-contexts-fail-and-ho... - talks about the various ways in which longer…

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Oh, and don't forget to retain the artist to correct the ever-increasingly weird and expensive mistakes made by the context when you need to draw newer, fancier pelicans. Maybe we can just train product to draw?

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

#149

Post by Zopieux »

dolebirchwood wrote: post #95
simonw wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need this skill if you're the engineer that's designing and implementing that preprocessing step.

The skill amounts to determining "what information is required for System A to achieve Outcome X." We already have a term for this: Critical thinking.

Why does it takes hundreds of comments for obvious facts to be laid out on this website? Thanks for the reality check.

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

#150

Post by somewhereoutth »

mgdev wrote: post #77

If we zoom out far enough, and start to put more and more under the execution umbrella of AI, what we're actually describing here is... product development. You are constructing the set of context, policies, directed attention toward some intentional end, same as it ever was. The difference is you need fewer meat bags to do it, even as your projects get larger and larger. To me this is wholly encouraging. Some projec…

> for his own creations.

for their own creations is grammatically valid, and would avoid accusations of sexism!

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