Context engineering

The term “context engineering” is catching on as a superior replacement for “prompt engineering,” and I think it’s a helpful reframe.

As Simon Willison notes, the problem with “prompt engineering” is that most people’s inferred definition reduces it to “typing things into a chatbot”, missing the inherent complexity entirely.

Simon also quotes Tobi Lütke (Shopify CEO), who captures it well:

I really like the term “context engineering” over prompt engineering.

It describes the core skill better: the art of providing all the context for the task to be plausibly solvable by the LLM.

The shift from “prompt” to “context” reframes the work from just crafting a clever instruction. It’s not about what you ask, but about all of the context you provide and all of the careful trade-offs that go into it.