Forwarded from Parallel Experiments (Linghao Zhang)
Naming is extremely important in Computer Science and, frankly, everything. Good naming is hard. Being able to pick a good name shows a lot of good taste.
Context engineering (a term promoted by Karpathy: https://vxtwitter.com/karpathy/status/1937902205765607626) is much better than:
- Prompt engineering: "Prompt" is just too overloaded.
- In-context learning: This is more of a research term and feels awkward to describe engineering required for building good LLM applications.
- RAG: Today, when done right, RAG is a very specific kind of context engineering. But too many people conflate it with "anything that puts stuff in the prompt".
Image credit: https://github.com/humanlayer/12-factor-agents/blob/main/content/factor-03-own-your-context-window.md
Context engineering (a term promoted by Karpathy: https://vxtwitter.com/karpathy/status/1937902205765607626) is much better than:
- Prompt engineering: "Prompt" is just too overloaded.
- In-context learning: This is more of a research term and feels awkward to describe engineering required for building good LLM applications.
- RAG: Today, when done right, RAG is a very specific kind of context engineering. But too many people conflate it with "anything that puts stuff in the prompt".
Image credit: https://github.com/humanlayer/12-factor-agents/blob/main/content/factor-03-own-your-context-window.md