There is no need to develop this ‘skill’. This can all be automated as a preprocessing step before the main request runs. Then you can have agents with infinite context, etc.
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
#32[dead]
Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
#33I 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…
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.
Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
#34I look forward to 5 million LinkedIn posts repeating this
Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
#35I’m curious how this applies to systems like ChatGPT, which now have two kinds of memory: user-configurable memory (a list of facts or preferences) and an opaque chat history memory. If context is the core unit of interaction, it seems important to give users more control or at least visibility into both.
I know context engineering is critical for agents, but I wonder if it's also useful for shaping personality and improving overall relatability? I'm curious if anyone else has thought about that.
Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
#36Definitely mirrors my experience. One heuristic I've often used when providing context to model is "is this enough information for a human to solve this task?". Building some text2SQL products in the past it was very interesting to see how often when the model failed, a real data analyst would reply something like "oh yea, that's an older table we don't use any more, the correct table is...". This means the model was…
Asking yes no questions will get you a lie 50% of the time.
Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
#37Finding a magic prompt was never “prompt engineering” it was always “context engineering” - lots of “AI wannabe gurus” sold it as such but they never knew any better.
RAG wasn’t invented this year.
Proper tooling that wraps esoteric knowledge like using embeddings, vector dba or graph dba becomes more mainstream. Big players improve their tooling so more stuff is available.
Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
#38context engineering is just a phrase that karpathy uttered for the first time 6 days ago and now everyone is treating it like its a new field of science and engineering
Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
#39Cool, but wait another year or two and context engineering will be obsolete as well. It still feels like tinkering with the machine, which is what AI is (supposed to be) moving us away from.
Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
#40If I need to do all this work (gather data, organize it, prepare it, etc), there are other AI solutions I might decide to use instead of an LLM.