Comment by calebkaiser

Based on the comments, I expected this to be slop listing a bunch of random prompt snippets from the author's personal collection.

I'm honestly a bit confused at the negativity here. The article is incredibly benign and reasonable. Maybe a bit surface level and not incredibly in depth, but at a glance, it gives fair and generally accurate summaries of the actual mechanisms behind inference. The examples it gives for "context engineering patterns" are actual systems that you'd need to implement (RAG, structured output, tool calling, etc.), not just a random prompt, and they're all subject to pretty thorough investigation from the research community.

The article even echoes your sentiments about "prompt engineering," down to the use of the word "incantation". From the piece:

> This was the birth of so-called "prompt engineering", though in practice there was often far less "engineering" than trial-and-error guesswork. This could often feel closer to uttering mystical incantations and hoping for magic to happen, rather than the deliberate construction and rigorous application of systems thinking that epitomises true engineering.