컨텍스트 엔지니어링
- 2025-06-29 (modified: 2025-10-10)
Prompt engineering보다 포괄적인 새 이름. Shopify의 CEO인 Tobi Lutke가 2025년 6월 19일에 제안한 용어.
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.1
Andrej Karpathy가 지지하면서 널리 알려진다.
+1 for “context engineering” over “prompt 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. Science because doing this right involves task descriptions and explanations, few shot examples, RAG, related (possibly multimodal) data, tools, state and history, compacting…. Too little or of the wrong form and the LLM doesn’t have the right context for optimal performance. Too much or too irrelevant and the LLM costs might go up and performance might come down. Doing this well is highly non-trivial. And art because of the guiding intuition around LLM psychology of people spirits.
On top of context engineering itself, an LLM app has to:
- break up problems just right into control flows
- pack the context windows just right
- dispatch calls to LLMs of the right kind and capability
- handle generation-verification UI/UX flows
- a lot more - guardrails, security, evals, parallelism, prefetching, …
So context engineering is just one small piece of an emerging thick layer of non-trivial software that coordinates individual LLM calls (and a lot more) into full LLM apps. The term “ChatGPT wrapper” is tired and really, really wrong.2
Articles
- 2025-10-06 - Agentic Context Engineering: Evolving Contexts for Self-Improving Language Models
- 2025-09-29 - anthropic.com/engineering/effective-context-engineering-for-ai-agents
- 2025-06-26 - How Long Contexts Fail & How to Fix Your Context
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컨텍스트 엔지니어링은 프로그래밍에서의 메모리 관리처럼 점차 자동화될 것 같다. 지금도 일부 제한적인 상황에선 메모리 관리를 수동으로 해야하지만 대체로는 자동(예: Garbage collection)으로 해도 문제가 없다. 컨텍스트 엔지니어링도 점차 복잡해지기 시작하면서 시간이 조금만 지나면 “옛날엔 이걸 수동으로 했다고?”하며 놀랄 것 같다. —2025-10-01