News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering. Parent comment

Re:The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engine... by colordrops on Tuesday July 01, 2025 @03:10AM (#44431370)
> Since these are non-deterministic machines, I fail to see any reliable heuristic that is fundamentally indistinguishable than "trying and seeing" with prompts

There are many sciences involving non-determinism that still have laws and patterns, e.g. biology and maybe psychology. It's not all or nothing.

Also, LLMs are deterministic, just not predictable. The non-determinism is injected by providers.

Anyway is there an essential difference between prompt engineering and context engineering? They seem like two names for the same thing.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engine... by simonw on Tuesday July 01, 2025 @08:04AM (#44433039)
They arguably are two names for the same thing.

The difference is that "prompt engineering" as a term has failed, because to a lot of people the inferred definition is "a laughably pretentious term for typing text into a chatbot" - it's become indistinguishable from end-user prompting.

My hope is that "context engineering" better captures the subtle art of building applications on top of LLMs through carefully engineering their context.

[ Parent | on HN ]