Prompt Engineering vs. Context Engineering
NewBoth are about getting better answers out of an LLM, and the newer title is sometimes just a rename. Prompt engineering is writing and refining the instructions given to the model. Context engineering is the wider engineering job of deciding everything the model sees at each step — retrieved documents, tool results, memory, conversation history — within its limited context window. It matters most for agents that run for many steps.
How to tell them apart on a resume
Prompt engineering
Prompt templates, few-shot examples, system prompts, tone and format instructions, prompt libraries — often product, content or AI-ops roles as well as engineers.
Context engineering
Retrieval, summarising long histories, agent memory, tool outputs, token budgets, context window limits — engineers building agents or long-running AI systems.
The question that settles it
“Was your work mainly writing the instructions the model gets, or building the system that decides which documents, history and tool results go into each request?”
Read the full definitions
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