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The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
271–280 of 550 posts
Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
#272It is wrong. The new/old skill is reverse engineering. If the majority of the code is generated by AI, you'll still need people with technical expertise to make sense of it.
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Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
#273I look forward to 5 million LinkedIn posts repeating this
"The other day my colleague walked up to me and said Jon, prompting is the new skill that's needed.
I laughed and told them there wrong. Here's why ->"
Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why are we drawing a difference between "prompt" and "context" exactly? The linked article is a bit of puffery that redefines a commonly-used term - "context" - to mean something different than what it's meant so far when we discuss "context windows." It seems to just be some puffery to generate new hype. When you play with the APIs the prompt/context all blurs together into just stuff that goes into the text fed to…
One crucial difference between prompt and the context: the prompt is just content that is provided by a user. The context also includes text that was output by the bot - in conversational interfaces the context incorporates the system prompt, then the user's first prompt, the LLMs reply, the user's next prompt and so-on.
Here, even making that distinction of prompt-as-most-recent-user-input-only, if we use context as how it's generally been defined in "context window" then RAG and such are not then part of the context. They are just things that certain applications might use to enrich the context.
But personally I think a focus on "prompt" that refers to a specific text box in a specific application vs using it to refer to the sum total of the model input increases confusion about what's going on behind the scenes. At least when referring to products built on the OpenAI Chat Completions APIs, which is what I've used the most.
Building a simple dummy chatbot UI is very informative here for de-mystifying things and avoiding misconceptions about the model actually "learning" or having internal "memory" during your conversation. You're just supplying a message history as the model input prompt. It's your job to keep submitting the history - and you're perfectly able to change it if you like (such as rolling up older messages to keep a shorter context window).
Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is only so much you can do with prompts. To go from the 70% accuracy you can achieve with that to the 95% accuracy I see in Claude Code, the context is absolutely the most important, and it’s visible how much effort goes into making sure Claude retrieves exactly the right context, often at the expense of speed.
Why are we drawing a difference between "prompt" and "context" exactly? The linked article is a bit of puffery that redefines a commonly-used term - "context" - to mean something different than what it's meant so far when we discuss "context windows." It seems to just be some puffery to generate new hype. When you play with the APIs the prompt/context all blurs together into just stuff that goes into the text fed to…
Because the author is artifically shrinking the scope of one thing (prompt engineering) to make its replacement look better (context engineering).
Never mind that prompt engineering goes back to pure LLMs before ChatGPT was released (i.e. before the conversation paradigm was even the dominant one for LLMs), and includes anything from few-shot prompting (including question-answer pairs), providing tool definitions and examples, retrieval augmented generation, and conversation history manipulation. In academic writing, LLMs are often defined as a distribution P(y|x) where X is not infrequently referred to as the prompt. In other words, anything that comes before the output is considered the prompt.
But if you narrow the definition of "prompt" down to "user instruction", then you get to ignore all the work that's come before and talk up the new thing.
Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
#276The model starts every conversation as a blank slate, so providing a thorough context regarding the problem you want it to solve seems a fairly obvious preparatory step tbh. How else is it supposed to know what to do? I agree that "prompt" is probably not quite the right word to describe what is necessary though - it feels a bit minimal and brief. "Context engineering" seems a bit overblown, but this is tech. and we do a love a grand title.
Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Not really. Got some code you don't understand? Feed it to a model and ask it to add comments. Absolutely not. An experienced individual in their field can tell if the AI made a mistake in the comments / code rather than the typical untrained eye. So no, actually read the code and understand what it does. > Ultimately humans will never need to look at most AI-generated code, any more than we have to look at the mac…
So for safety critical systems, one should not look or check if code has been AI generated? If you don't review the code your C compiler generates now, why not? Compiler bugs still happen, you know.
You do understand that LLM output is non-deterministic and tends to have a higher error ratio than compiler bugs, which do not exhibit this “feature”.
I see in one of your other posts that you were loudly grumbling about being downvoted. You may want to revisit if taking a combative, bad faith approach while replying to other people is really worth it.
Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
#278> 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…
Tha problem is that "right" is defined circularly
Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 isn't using that term in a military context, he's using it in a gaming context. He defines what he means very clearly: > The term “loadout” is a gaming term that refers to the specific combination of abilities, weapons, and equipment you select before a level, match, or round. In the military you don't select your abilities before entering a level.
the military definitely do use the term loadout. It can be based on mission parameters e.g. if armored vehicles are expected, your loadout might include more MANPATS. It can also refer to the way each soldier might customize their gear, e.g. cutaway knife in boot or on vest, NODs if extended night operations expected (I know, I know, gamers would like to think you'd bring everything, but in real life no warfighter would want to carry extra weight unnecessarily!), or even the placement of gear on their MOLLE vests (all that velcro has a reason).
Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
#280You can give most of the modern LLMs pretty darn good context and they will still fail. Our company has been deep down this path for over 2 years. The context crowd seems oddly in denial about this
I mean at some point it is probably easier to do the work without AI and at least then you would actually learn something useful instead of spending hours crafting context to actually get something useful out of an AI.
Agreed until/unless you end up at one of those bleeding-edge AI-mandate companies (Microsoft is in the news this week as one of them) that will simply PIP you for being a luddite if you aren't meeting AI usage metrics.