Prompts vs. Context | Drew Breunig
July 2, 2025
I’m not the only one thinking about how context management is the key to good LLM applications. Since publishing our post detailing how long contexts fail, a conversation emerged regarding the term “context engineering,” compared to “prompt engineering.” (Let’s be clear…I had nothing to do with starting the debate, it’s just a happy coincidence…)
Today, Andrej Karpathy weighed in, supporting “context engineering”:
“People associate prompts with short task descriptions you’d give an LLM in your day-to-day use. When in every industrial-strength LLM app, context engineering is the delicate art and science of filling the context window with just the right information for the next step.”
When generative AI first started getting attention, the role of the Prompt Engineering and Prompt Engineering got a lot of attention. That’s waned over time, but the focus on the prompt as the key way of interacting with LLMs remains. Some like Drew Breunig suggest it’s context not the prompt alone that we should focus on. Here he explains.
