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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

#241

Post by skydhash »

Daub wrote: post #230
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…

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 an…

> artists and designers lack the consistent terminology to describe what they are doing

I don't think they do. It may not be completely consistent, but open any art book and you find the same thing being explained again and again. Just for drawing humans, you will find emphasis on the skeleton and muscle volume for forms and poses, planes (especially the head) for values and shadows, some abstract things like stability and line weight, and some more concrete things like foreshortening.

Several books and course have gone over those concepts. They are not difficult to explain, they are just difficult to master. That's because you have to apply judgement for every single line or brush stroke deciding which factors matter most and if you even want to do the stroke. Then there's the whole hand eye coordination.

So unless you can solve judgement (which styles derive from), there's not a lot of hope there.

ADDENDUM

And when you do a study of another's work, it's not copying the data, extracting colors, or comparing labels,... It's just studying judgement. You know the complete formula from which a more basic version is being used for the work, and you only want to know the parameters. Whereas machine training is mostly going for the wrong formula with completely different variables.

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

#244

Post by NoraCodes »

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…

I don't understand how you can look at behavior like this from the companies selling these systems and conclude that it is ethical for them to do so, or for you to promote their products.

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

#245

Post by simonw »

NoraCodes wrote: post #244
simonw wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't understand how you can look at behavior like this from the companies selling these systems and conclude that it is ethical for them to do so, or for you to promote their products.

What's happening here is Claude (and ChatGPT alike) have a tool-based search option. You ask them a question - like "who won the Superbowl in 1998" - they then run a search against a classic web search engine (Bing for ChatGPT, Brave for Claude) and fetch back cached results from that engine. They inject those results into their context and use them to answer the question.

Using just a few words (the name of the team) feels OK to me, though you're welcome to argue otherwise.

The Claude search system prompt is there to ensure that Claude doesn't spit out multiple paragraphs of text from the underlying website, in a way that would discourage you from clicking through to the original source.

Personally I think this is an ethical way of designing that feature.

(Note that the way this works is an entirely different issue from the fact that these models were training on unlicensed data.)

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

#246

Post by [deleted] »

simonw wrote: post #245
NoraCodes wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how you can look at behavior like this from the companies selling these systems and conclude that it is ethical for them to do so, or for you to promote their products.

What's happening here is Claude (and ChatGPT alike) have a tool-based search option. You ask them a question - like "who won the Superbowl in 1998" - they then run a search against a classic web search engine (Bing for ChatGPT, Brave for Claude) and fetch back cached results from that engine. They inject those results into their context and use them to answer the question. Using just a few words (the name of the team…

[deleted]

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

#247

Post by NoraCodes »

simonw wrote: post #245
NoraCodes wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how you can look at behavior like this from the companies selling these systems and conclude that it is ethical for them to do so, or for you to promote their products.

What's happening here is Claude (and ChatGPT alike) have a tool-based search option. You ask them a question - like "who won the Superbowl in 1998" - they then run a search against a classic web search engine (Bing for ChatGPT, Brave for Claude) and fetch back cached results from that engine. They inject those results into their context and use them to answer the question. Using just a few words (the name of the team…

I understand how it works. I think it does not do much to encourage clicking through, because the stated goal is to solve the user's problem without leaving the chat interface (most of the time.)

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

#248

Post by Madmallard »

bgwalter wrote: post #139

These 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…

There's quite a lot science that goes into WoW strategizing at this point.

People are using their thinking caps and modelling data.

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

#249

Post by dysoco »

bgwalter wrote: post #139

These 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…

> Purportedly working strategies found by trial and error and discussed in a language that is only intelligible to the in-group

This really does sound like Computer Science since it's very beginnings.

The only difference is that now it's a much more popular field, and not restricted to a few nerds sharing tips over e-mail or bbs.

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

#250

Post by j45 »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #177
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…

It’s just AI people moving the goalposts now that everyone has realised that “prompt engineering” isn’t a special skill.

Everything is new to someone and the tends of reference will evolve.
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