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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

#161

Post by Zopieux »

simonw wrote: post #70
patrickhogan1 wrote: post #54

OpenAI’s o3 searches the web behind a curtain: you get a few source links and a fuzzy reasoning trace, but never the full chunk of text it actually pulled in. Without that raw context, it’s impossible to audit what really shaped the answer.

Yeah, I find that really frustrating. I understand why they do it though: if they presented the actual content that came back from search they would absolutely get in trouble for copyright-infringement. I suspect that's why so much of the Claude 4 system prompt for their search tool is the message "Always respect copyright by NEVER reproducing large 20+ word chunks of content from search results" repeated half a doze…

This is no secret or suspicion. It is definitely about avoiding (more accuratly, delaying until legislation destroys the business model) the warth of copyright holders with enough lawyers.

I find this very hypocritical given that for all intents and purposes the infringement already happened at training time, since most content wasn't acquired with any form of retribution or attribution (otherwise this entire endeavor would not have been economically worth it). See also the "you're not allowed to plagiarize Disney" being done by all commercial text to image providers.

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

#163

Post by nandhinianand »

simonw wrote: post #29
davidclark wrote: post #24

Good example of why I have been totally ignoring people who beat the drum of needing to develop the skills of interacting with models. “Learn to prompt” is already dead? Of course, the true believers will just call this an evolution of prompting or some such goalpost moving. Personally, my goalpost still hasn’t moved: I’ll invest in using AI when we are past this grand debate about its usefulness. The utility of a ca…

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.

I think this is definitely true for novel writing and stuff like that based on my experiments with AI so far.. I'm still on the fence about coding/building s/w based on it, but that may just be about the unlearning and re-learning i'm yet to do/try out.

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

#164

Post by orbital-decay »

risyachka wrote: post #102
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…

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

Many people figured it out two-three years ago when AI-assisted coding basically wasn't a thing, and it's still relevant and will stay relevant. These are fundamental principles, all big models work similarly, not just transformers and not just LLMs.

However, many fundamental phenomena are missing from the "context engineering" scope, so neither context engineering nor prompt engineering are useful terms.

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

#166

Post by Zopieux »

rednafi wrote: post #62
adhamsalama wrote: post #28

There is no engineering involved in using AI. It's insulting to call begging an LLM "engineering".

This. Convincing a bullshit generator to give you the right data isn’t engineering, it quackery. But I guess “context quackery” wouldn’t sell as much. LLMs are quite useful and I leverage them all the time. But I can’t stand these AI yappers saying the same shit over and over again in every media format and trying to sell AI usage as some kind of profound wizardry when it’s not.

That's the definition of a hype cycle. Can't wait for tech to be past it.

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

#167

Post by pyman »

benreesman wrote: post #154

The new skill is programming, same as the old skill. To the extent these things are comprehensible, you understand them by writing programs: programs that train them, programs that run inferenve, programs that analyze their behavior. You get the most out of LLMs by knowing how they work in detail. I had one view of what these things were and how they work, and a bunch of outcomes attached to that. And then I spent a…

Saying the best way to understand LLMs is by building one is like saying the best way to understand compilers is by writing one. Technically true, but most people aren't interested in going that deep.

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

#169

Post by Zopieux »

rvz wrote: post #63

This is just another "rebranding" of the failed "prompt engineering" trend to promote another borderline pseudo-scientific trend to attact more VC money to fund a new pyramid scheme. Assuming that this will be using the totally flawed MCP protocol, I can only see more cases of data exfiltration attacks on these AI systems just like before [0] [1]. Prompt injection + Data exfiltration is the new social engineering in…

Rediscovering basic security concepts and hygiene from 2005 is also a very hot AI thing right now, so that tracks.

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

#170

Post by scubbo »

outofpaper wrote: post #33
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drew Breunig's posts are a must read on this. This is not only important for writing your own agents, it is also critical when using agentic coding right now. These limitations/behaviors will be with us for a while.

They might be good reads on the topic but Drew makes some significant etymological mistakes. For example loadout doesn't come from gaming but military terminology. It's essentially the same as kit or gear.

It _is_ a gaming term - it is also a military term (from which the gaming term arose).
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