Prompt Engineering Is Table Stakes. Context Engineering Is the Next Frontier.
Salesforce published something last week that I've been thinking about: they're drawing a distinction between prompt engineering (optimizing the question) and context engineering (optimizing the conditions under which the question is answered).
If you've been building with AI agents for more than a few months, this distinction probably resonates. I can tell you from experience: most agent failures aren't bad prompts. They're missing context, wrong context, or context the agent can't access when it needs it.
What Context Engineering Actually Covers
Context engineering is the practice of designing the information architecture around your agent. Specifically:
