Context Engineering: Why Prompt Engineering Was Never Enough

For a while, “prompt engineering” was the name we gave to the craft of getting good results from large language models. It made sense in the early days. Most people were using one-shot interactions, and the main lever really did feel like wording: ask more clearly, add an example, constrain the format, and the model behaved better. That framing is now too small for the real problem. When an AI…