13/ Prompt engineering made AI useful for individuals.
Context engineering makes AI useful for systems.
The next great AI products will not just have better prompts.
They will have better memory, better retrieval, better tools, and better traces.
1/ YOUR AI APP DOESN’T NEED A BETTER PROMPT
Most AI apps do not fail because the model is dumb.
They fail because the model is blind.
It cannot see the right file.
It forgot what happened before.
It retrieved the wrong chunk.
It has no trace of its own work.
That is not a prompt problem.
12/ Rule 7: compress before the model sees it.
Raw context is expensive and noisy.
Good systems summarize, rank, deduplicate, and remove garbage before the model reads.
Context engineering is not dumping more tokens.
It is building the right input.