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Context Engineering Guide
- Sebastian_09 1y agoPrompt engineering and now ”context engineering” are really the poor man’s engineering work when you’re subject to model iterations and cannot control any of the stochasticity of the models… what we need is better science to understand how to control large model’s output, not more LinkedIn AI influencers
- _Algernon_ 1y agoReads like an alchemist trying to write about how to create gold.
- behnamoh 1y agoGreat, yet another hyped up word to keep the AI hype going... I respect Karpathy, but I can’t shake the feeling that recently has been doing more damage than good to the AI community. First he came up with “vibecoding“ and now this one. What we need is better engineering approaches to build AI systems, not buzzy marketing words that only benefit AI companies.
- saturatedfat 1y agowriting an essay on this if you'd be interested in reading a rough draft. i believe this very strongly and i think it's the UX that got us here and it's UX that'll take us out.
- 9dev 1y agoHonestly, I don’t think it’s about AI even. The world has become so cynical, that’s just how people make business now. If it wasn’t context engineering, it’d be professional Watermelonism.
- cavisne 1y agoVibecoding is an excellent term, its communicates that the output and process is not entirely serious. I think without this term we would have even more PM types announcing that programming is dead and you just need a business person with some prompts copied off linkedin. I think this gives room for non technical people to vibecode prototypes, knowing that the output will eventually go off the rails without technical understanding.
- jalapenos 1y agoI guess codepooping just didn't have the same ring
- ContextSpace 1y ago[dead]
- evrimoztamur 1y ago"Include relevant files directly, instead of letting the agent immediately grep your codebase, to save ninety seconds."
- apwell23 1y agothis is too convoluted and has no proof why it should be done this way
- gavinh 1y agoThis is exhausting.
- jalapenos 1y agoYou sir are a tiredness engineer
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- thorum 1y agoThe interesting part of context engineering (the actual engineering part) is figuring out how to gather the information the LLM needs to do a task correctly from your system. For example, the secret sauce of GitHub Copilot is how it decides what parts of your codebase to show the LLM. This is surprisingly hard when you need something other than simple RAG. In many cases the data source you need doesn’t exist and you have to build it. The prompt engineering side of the problem (how you structure your prompt) is trivial by comparison and will become less and less relevant as frontier models improve.
- jimby 1y agoOne thing I've noticed is llms are much better at outputting tabular data than json objects, especially for lists
- zmmmmm 1y agoIt seems endemic to software to me that people constantly want to brand things as "engineering" that aren't. They always want to call it engineering because it sounds better but they don't want to do nearly anything associated with engineering - rigorous process control, systematic documentation, specification of tolerances, resource usage etc etc. What's described here is mostly a list of barely disguised tips, tricks and heuristics. It's all fine until someone wants to put it in production and suddenly a "real" engineer has to take over and do the actual engineering. (and yes, I'm old - and grumpy!)
- bachmeier 1y agoAnyone believing software engineering is a legitimate term should also accept context engineering as a legitimate term. Wikipedia's definition of engineering includes "The creative application of scientific principles to design or develop structures, machines, apparatus, or manufacturing processes, or works utilizing them singly or in combination" and context engineering as the term is used definitely qualifies if software engineering does.
- jjmarr 1y agoLicensed engineers accept responsibility for those structures/machines/etc when they physically harm or kill others. Like lawyers or doctors being sued for malpractice. A typical person does not understand scientific principles and cannot validate whether a bridge is safe before using it. An engineer that approves a bridge can be held liable when that bridge fails, even if they had orders from their boss or company. If you're not prepared to accept personal liability when your code kills someone or causes a disaster, you shouldn't try to be an engineer. I live in a country (Canada) where software engineering is legally considered engineering and that's what officially distinguishes a "software engineer" from a "software developer". In practice, I rarely see the rule followed.
- ekianjo 1y agoLegal responsibility and the matter of engineering are two different and unrelated things. You can do engineering without a license.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- adidoit 1y agoThe shift from prompt engineering to context engineering is a massive tailwind for the "GenAI certification industry™"
- xnx 1y agoSounds like a lot of superstition if there aren't the examples to show that such a complicated approach beats a less complicated ones.
- spicyusername 1y agoAs others have mentioned, I wish we'd stop borrowing the word engineering for everything. This domain is so far from real engineering it's almost embarrassing.
- stpedgwdgfhgdd 1y agoJust asked CC to create a work tree and branch. (Space was a typo) What did it do? Just a branch… You cant trust LLMs for 100%, constant supervision is needed
- ContextSpace 1y ago[dead]