Author(s): “The AI Engineer”
Originally published on Towards AI.
created by GEMINI
On June 25, 2025, Andrej Karpathy posted eleven words on X that quietly ended one era of AI engineering and opened another. Quoting a post from Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke from a week earlier, Karpathy said he preferred “context engineering” to “prompt engineering,” calling it the delicate art of filling the context window with exactly the right information for the next step. Within days, the term had colonized engineering blogs, conference talks, and LinkedIn bios. Within a year, Gartner was reportedly telling enterprise AI leaders that context engineering was in and prompt engineering was out.
That framing has calcified into a consensus most AI engineers now repeat without examining: prompt engineering was the training-wheels discipline of 2023, context engineering is the real skill of 2025 and 2026, and anyone still optimizing individual prompts is behind the curve. It’s a tidy story. It’s also missing the actual plot twist that’s been building in production agent systems since late 2025 — one that neither the prompt engineering loyalists nor the context engineering evangelists saw coming.
