Context Engineering: Explained Simply

Everyone is talking about prompt engineering being dead. That is only half true. What replaced it is bigger, quieter, and a lot interesting. Where this term came from In mid-2025, Andrej Karpathy posted something that spread fast. He said the skill that actually matters for building with LLMs is not writing better prompts. It is context engineering: carefully constructing the information that goes into the context window so the model has exactly what it needs to do a good job. Around the same time, Tobi Lutke, CEO of Shopify, used the same phrase in an internal memo that went public.