alt Hacker News>Whether they call it now "prompt" or "context" engineering because it's the same tinkering to find something that "sticks" in non-deterministic space.
I dont quite follow. Prompts and contexts are different things. Sure, you can get thing into contexts with prompts but that doesn't mean they are entirely the same.
You could have a long running conversation with a lot in the context. A given prompt may work poorly, whereas it would have worked quite well earlier. I don't think this difference is purely semantic.
For whatever it's worth I've never liked the term "prompt engineering." It is perhaps the quintessential example of overusing the word engineering.
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I always used "prompting" to mean "providing context" in genral not necesarlly just clever instructions like people seem to be using the term.
And yes, I view clever instructions like "great grandma's last wish" still as just providing context.
>A given prompt may work poorly, whereas it would have worked quite well earlier.
The context is not the same! Of course the "prompt" (clever last sentence you just added to the context) is not going to work "the same". The model has a different context now.
Yeah, if anything it should be called an art.
The term engineering makes little sense in this context, but really... Did it make sense for eg "QA Engineer" and all the other jobs we tacked it on, too? I don't think so, so it's kinda arguing after we've been misusing the term for well over 10 yrs
"Context Crafting"
Both the context and the prompt are just part of the same input. To the model there is no difference, the only difference is the way the user feeds that input to the model. You could in theory feed the context into the model as one huge prompt.