Context Engineering: Why Prompt Engineering Is Dead
Prompt engineering optimizes a constant. Context engineering optimizes a function. A field guide to the discipline that actually determines LLM quality.
Key Takeaways
- Production LLM quality is determined less by prompt wording than by the pipeline that assembles each context window.
- A prompt is a static constant that converges after days of work; context is a per-request function that never stops needing engineering.
- That function decomposes into a supply chain - sourcing, selection, shaping, sequencing - and every production failure can be located in one of those stages.
- Token provenance (knowing where every context token came from and why) turns the context window from a blob into a reviewable artifact.
- The prompt still matters for policy and output contracts, but the ongoing engineering surface, the failure surface, and the quality ceiling all live in the context function.