Prompt Engineering vs Context Engineering

From Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/effective-context-engineering-for-ai-agents

Prompt Engineering:

Prompt engineering refers to methods for writing and organizing LLM instructions for optimal outcomes

Context Engineering

Context engineering refers to the set of strategies for curating and maintaining the optimal set of tokens (information) during LLM inference, including all the other information that may land there outside of the prompts.

I like this framing because in the world of agentic systems, writing clever prompts alone won’t cut it. Agents operate in dynamic environments, constantly juggling new information. The real skill is curating which pieces of that evolving universe end up in context at the right moment. It’s a subtle but powerful shift that mirrors how good software architectures focus not only on code, but also on data flow.

If you’re building or designing AI agents, this is worth a read.