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The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
221–230 of 550 posts
Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
#222> Conclusion Building powerful and reliable AI Agents is becoming less about finding a magic prompt or model updates. It is about the engineering of context and providing the right information and tools, in the right format, at the right time. It’s a cross-functional challenge that involves understanding your business use case, defining your outputs, and structuring all the necessary information so that an LLM can “a…
The difference is that humans can actively seek to acquire the necessary context by themselves. They don't have to passively sit there and wait for someone else to do the tedious work of feeding them all necessary context upfront. And we value humans who are able to proactively do that seeking by themselves, until they are satisfied that they can do a good job.
> The difference is that humans can actively seek to acquire the necessary context by themselves
These days, so can LLM systems. The tool calling pattern got really good in the last six months, and one of the most common uses of that is to let LLMs search for information they need to add to their context.
o3 and o4-mini and Claude 4 all do this with web search in their user-facing apps and it's extremely effective.
The same patterns is increasingly showing up in coding agents, giving them the ability to search for relevant files or even pull in official document documentation for libraries.
Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
or agile and scrums.
Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s just AI people moving the goalposts now that everyone has realised that “prompt engineering” isn’t a special skill.
In other words, "if AI doesn't work for you the problem is not IA, it is the user", that's what AI companies want us to believe.
That’s a good indicator of an ideology at work: no-true-Scotsman deployed at every turn.
Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
#225I love how we have such a poor model of how LLMs work (or more aptly don't work) that we are developing an entire alchemical practice around them. Definitely seems healthy for the industry and the species.
The stuff that's showing up under the "context engineering" banner feels a whole lot less alchemical to me than the older prompt engineering tricks. Alchemical is "you are the world's top expert on marketing, and if you get it right I'll tip you $100, and if you get it wrong a kitten will die". The techniques in https://www.dbreunig.com/2025/06/26/how-to-fix-your-context.... seem a whole lot more rational to me than…
As it gets more rigorous and predictable I suppose you could say it approaches psychology.
Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
#226Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
#227The dudes who ran the Oracle of Delphi must have had this problem too.
Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
#228I 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.
If you're not writing your own agents, you can skip this skill.
Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you link to the research on millions of different terms and stable long contexts? I haven't come across that yet.
You can look at AnyTool, 2024 (16,000 tools) and start looking at newer research from there. https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.04253 For long contexts start with activation beacons and RoPE scaling.
RoPE scaling is not an ideal solution since all LLMs in general start degrading at around 8k. You also have the problem of cost by yolo'ing long context per task turn even if the LLM were capable of crunching 1M tokens. If you self host then you have the problem of prompt processing time. So it doesnt matter in the end if the problem is solved and we can invoke n number of tools per task turn. It will be a quick way to become poor as long as providers are charging per token. The only viable solution is to use a smart router so only the relevant tools and their descriptions are appended to the context per task turn.
Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
#230I 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…
For visual art I feel that the existing approaches in context engineering are very much lacking. An Ai understands well enough such simple things as content (bird, dog, owl etc), color (blue green etc) and has a fair understanding of foreground/background. However, the really important stuff is not addressed.
For example: in form, things like negative shape and overlap. In color contrast things like Ratio contrast and dynamic range contrast. Or how manipulating neighboring regional contrast produces tone wrap. I could go on.
One reason for this state of affairs is that artists and designers lack the consistent terminology to describe what they are doing (though this does not stop them from operating at a high level). Indeed, many of the terms I have used here we (my colleagues and I) had to invent ourselves. I would love to work with an AI guru to address this developing problem.