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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

#71

Post by hobs »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #4

Definitely 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…

The thing is, all the people cosplaying as data scientists don't want evaluations, and that's why you saw so little in fake C level projects, because telling people the emperor has no clothes doesn't pay.

For those actually using the products to make money well, hey - all of those have evaluations.

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

#72

Post by CharlieDigital »

I was at a startup that started using OpenAI APIs pretty early (almost 2 years ago now?).

"Back in the day", we had to be very sparing with context to get great results so we really focused on how to build great context. Indexing and retrieval were pretty much our core focus.

Now, even with the larger windows, I find this still to be true.

The moat for most companies is actually their data, data indexing, and data retrieval[0]. Companies that 1) have the data and 2) know how to use that data are going to win.

My analogy is this:

    > The LLM is just an oven; a fantastical oven.  But for it to produce a good product still depends on picking good ingredients, in the right ratio, and preparing them with care.  You hit the bake button, then you still need to finish it off with presentation and decoration.
[0] https://chrlschn.dev/blog/2024/11/on-bakers-ovens-and-ai-sta...

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

#73

Post by retinaros »

it is still sending a string of chars and hoping the model outputs something relevant. let’s not do like finance and permanently obfuscate really simple stuff to make us bigger than we are.

prompt engineering/context engineering : stringbuilder

Retrieval augmented generation: search+ adding strings to main string

test time compute: running multiple generation and choosing the best

agents: for loop and some ifs

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

#74

Post by Foreignborn »

storus wrote: post #48
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…

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,…

yes, but those aren’t released and even then you’ll always need glue code.

you just need to knowingly resource what glue code is needed, and build it in a way it can scale with whatever new limits that upgraded models give you.

i can’t imagine a world where people aren’t building products that try to overcome the limitations of SOTA models

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

#75

Post by jumploops »

To anyone who has worked with LLMs extensively, this is obvious.

Single prompts can only get you so far (surprisingly far actually, but then they fall over quickly).

This is actually the reason I built my own chat client (~2 years ago), because I wanted to “fork” and “prune” the context easily; using the hosted interfaces was too opaque.

In the age of (working) tool-use, this starts to resemble agents calling sub-agents, partially to better abstract, but mostly to avoid context pollution.

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

#76

Post by [deleted] »

bGl2YW5j wrote: post #5

Saw 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…

[deleted]

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

#77

Post by mgdev »

If we zoom out far enough, and start to put more and more under the execution umbrella of AI, what we're actually describing here is... product development.

You are constructing the set of context, policies, directed attention toward some intentional end, same as it ever was. The difference is you need fewer meat bags to do it, even as your projects get larger and larger.

To me this is wholly encouraging.

Some projects will remain outside what models are capable of, and your role as a human will be to stitch many smaller projects together into the whole. As models grow more capable, that stitching will still happen - just as larger levels.

But as long as humans have imagination, there will always be a role for the human in the process: as the orchestrator of will, and ultimate fitness function for his own creations.

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

#79

Post by hobs »

hnthrow90348765 wrote: post #39

Cool, 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.

Probably impossible unless computers themselves change in another year or two.
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