The Large Language Models that power generative AI and the agents that rely on them have a memory problem that limits the usefulness of prompts alone.
The term "context engineering" was recently popularised by Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke in a tweet:
"I really like the term ‘context engineering’ over prompt engineering.
It describes the core skill better: the art of providing all the context for the task to be plausibly solvable by the LLM."