Prompt vs context engineering misses 3 layers: the 5-layer stack for shipping AI systems
blaizedsouza · x · 2026-08-21
The author argues the "prompt engineering vs context engineering" debate misses three layers, and shipping AI systems requires five:
- 01 Prompt engineering: crafting the input (role, instructions, examples, format, chain-of-thought); 90% of teams stop here.
- 02 Context engineering: curating what the model knows — docs, prior outputs, tool results, memory — ranked, compressed and deduplicated into a fixed window. A perfect prompt with wrong context still produces garbage.
- 03 Harness engineering: building the machine around the model — permission guards, tool access, sub-agents, and a verification layer checking output before use.
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