Of course the best prompts automatically included providing the best (not necessarily most) context to extract the right output.
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
#42Well, it’s still a prompt
Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
#43Earlier 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.
> 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.
Doesn't seem that significant?
Not to say those blog posts say anything much anyway that any "prompt engineer" (someone who uses LLMs frequently) doesn't already know, but maybe it is useful to some at such an early stage of these things.
Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
#44Saw this the other day and it made me think that too much effort and credence is being given to this idea of crafting the perfect environment for LLMs to thrive in. Which to me, is contrary to how powerful AI systems should function. We shouldn’t need to hold its hand so much. Obviously we’ve got to tame the version of LLMs we’ve got now, and this kind of thinking is a step in the right direction. What I take issue w…
It may not be a silver bullet, in that it needs lots of low level human guidance to do some complex task.
But looking at the trend of these tools, the help they are requiring is become more and more higher level, and they are becoming more and more capable of doing longer more complex tasks as well as being able to find the information they need from other systems/tools (search, internet, docs, code etc...).
I think its that trend that really is the exciting part, not just its current capabilities.
Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
#45Back in my day we just called this "knowing what to google" but alright, guys.
Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
#46Earlier 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 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.
Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
#47If 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.
You might as well use your natural intelligence instead of the artificial stuff at that point.
Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
#48I 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…
Those issues are considered artifacts of the current crop of LLMs in academic circles; there is already research allowing LLMs to use millions of different tools at the same time, and stable long contexts, likely reducing the amount of agents to one for most use cases outside interfacing different providers.
Anyone basing their future agentic systems on current LLMs would likely face LangChain fate - built for GPT-3, made obsolete by GPT-3.5.
Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
#49I really don’t get this rush to invent neologisms to describe every single behavioral artifact of LLMs. Maybe it’s just a yearning to be known as the father of Deez Unseen Mind-blowing Behaviors (DUMB).
LLM farts — Stochastic Wind Release.
The latest one is yet another attempt to make prompting sound like some kind of profound skill, when it’s really not that different from just knowing how to use search effectively.
Also, “context” is such an overloaded term at this point that you might as well just call it “doing stuff” — and you’d objectively be more descriptive.
Re: The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering
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