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Comment by hiq | Hacker News Reader

IMHO, don't, don't keep up. Just like "best practices in prompt engineering", these are just temporary workaround for current limitations, and they're bound to disappear quickly. Unless you really need the extra performance right now, just wait until models get you this performance out of the box instead of investing into learning something that'll be obsolete in months.

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I agree with your conclusion not to sweat all these features too much, but only because they're not hard at all to understand on demand once you realize that they all boil down to a small handful of ways to manipulate model context.

But context engineering very much not going anywhere as a discipline. Bigger and better models will by no means make it obsolete. In fact, raw model capability is pretty clearly leveling off into the top of an S-curve, and most real-world performance gains over the last year have been precisely because of innovations on how to better leverage context.

My point is that there'll be some layer doing that for you. We already have LLMs writing plans for another LLM to execute, and many other such orchestrations, to reduce the constraints on the actual human input. Those implementing this layer need to develop this context engineering; those simply using LLM-based products do not, as it'll be done for them somewhat transparently, eventually. Similar to how not every software engineer needs to be a compiler expert to run a program.

I agree with this take. Models and the tooling around them are both in flux. I d rather not spend time learning something in detail for these companies to then pull the plug chasing next-big-thing.

IMO, these are just marketing or new ways of using functions calling, under the hood they all get re-written as tools the model can call

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