Earlier quoted context omitted.
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And then the AI doesn’t handle the front end caching properly for the 100th time in a row so you edit the owl and nothing changes after you press save.
The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
201–210 of 550 posts
Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is total quackery. When you zoom out in these discussions you begin to see how the AI yappers and their methodology is just modern-day alchemy with its own jargon and "esoteric" techniques.
See my comment here. These new context engineering techniques are a whole lot less quackery than the prompting techniques from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44428628
"less"
Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
#203> 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…
This is like telling a soccer player that no change in practice or technique is fundamentally different than another, because ultimately people are non-deterministic machines.
Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Not really, no. Both of those projects are tinkertoy greenfield projects, done by people who know exactly what they're doing.
And both of them heavily caveat that experience:
> This only works if you have the capacity to review what it produces, of course. (And by “of course”, I mean probably many people will ignore this, even though it’s essential to get meaningful, consistent, long-term value out of these systems.)
> To be clear: this isn't an endorsement of using models for serious Open Source libraries...Treat it as a curious side project which says more about what's possible today than what's necessarily advisable.
It does nobody any good to oversell this shit.
Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
#205Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Not really, no. Both of those projects are tinkertoy greenfield projects, done by people who know exactly what they're doing. And both of them heavily caveat that experience: > This only works if you have the capacity to review what it produces, of course. (And by “of course”, I mean probably many people will ignore this, even though it’s essential to get meaningful, consistent, long-term value out of these systems.)…
A compiler optimization for LLVM is absolutely not a "tinkertoy greenfield projects".
I linked to those precisely because they aren't over-selling things. They're extremely competent engineers using LLMs to produce work that they would not have produced otherwise.
Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
#207Earlier 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.
>Drew makes some significant etymological mistakes. For example loadout doesn't come from gaming but military terminology
Does he pretend to give the etymology and ultimately origin of the term, or just where he or other AI-discussions found it? Because if it's the latter, he is entitled to call it a "gaming" term, because that's what it is to him and those in the discussion. He didn't find it in some military manual or learned it at boot camp!
But I would mostly challenge this mistake, if we admit it as such, is "significant" in any way.
The origin of loadout is totally irrelevant to the point he makes and the subject he discusses. It's just a useful term he adopted, it's history is not really relevant.
Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Doesn't change the argument.
Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
#209These discussions increasingly remind me of gamers discussing various strategies in WoW or similar. Purportedly working strategies found by trial and error and discussed in a language that is only intelligible to the in-group (because no one else is interested). We are entering a new era of gamification of programming, where the power users force their imaginary strategies on innocent people by selling them to the eq…
i tend to share your view. but then your comment describes a lot of previous cycles of enterprise software selling. it’s just that this time is reaching a little uncomfortably into the builder’s /developer’s traditional areas of influence/control/workflow. how devs feel now is probably how others (ex csr, qa, sre) felt in the past when their managers pushed whatever tooling/practice was becoming popular or sine qua n…
This has been happening to developers for years.
25 years ago it was object oriented programming.
Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
#210I 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.
What exactly month-long AI skills of 2023 AI are obsolete now?
Surely not prompt engineering itself, for example.