Context Engineering vs Prompting

Context engineering is the discipline of designing everything a model sees, not just the user-facing prompt: it encompasses system instructions, conversation history, retrieved documents, tool definitions, few-shot examples, and tool results that together shape model behavior. Prompt engineering focuses narrowly on crafting individual instructions, but in agentic systems the user's prompt is a small fraction of the total context; the majority arrives dynamically from tool results, retrieved data, and conversation state. Mastering context engineering means architecting the entire information environment the agent operates within, which sets the ceiling of what the agent can accomplish regardless of the quality of the underlying model.