Context Engineering vs Prompt Engineering
core
Context engineering is the discipline of designing everything a model sees, not just the user-facing prompt: it encompasses system instructions, conversation history, retrieved documents, tool definitions, few-shot examples, and tool results that together shape model behavior. Prompt engineering focuses narrowly on crafting individual instructions, but in agentic systems the user's prompt is a small fraction of the total context; the majority arrives dynamically from tool results, retrieved data, and conversation state.