Definition

What is Prompt Engineering?

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The practice of designing the text of prompts sent to a language model to improve the quality, format, or reliability of its output.

Prompt engineering focuses on how instructions are phrased. Context engineering, by contrast, focuses on what information the model has access to. For production AI systems, the bottleneck is almost always context, not phrasing. Prompt engineering remains useful for output shaping and tool-use scaffolding, but it cannot compensate for missing or stale data.

Related Context Engineering Context Window AI Agent

Further reading

Articles about Prompt Engineering

Context engineering: the end of prompt engineering

Prompt engineering is a dead end. Context engineering — designing what information AI models receive — is replacing it. Here's how to start applying it.

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AI Agent AI Hallucination AI Second Brain Context as a Service Context Compression Context Container Context Drift Context Engineering Context Portability Context Poisoning Context Rot Context Window Fine-Tuning MCP Server MCP (Model Context Protocol) Multi-Agent System Prompt Caching Prompt Engineering RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) Semantic Search Structured Context Wire

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