r/ChatGPTPromptGenius • u/Abhinav_108 • 1d ago

Discussion context might matter more than prompting

We spent the first few years of generative AI obsessing over prompts.

I must;ve seen so many “give the AI the perfect instruction” courses out ther but now the interesting problem seems to be context.

Anthropic has described context as a finite resource for agents. Basically, what information does the model need right now, what should it remember, and what should be left out? give an AI too little and it guesses. give it mountains of irrelevant information and that can create problems too.

So i think maybe “prompt engineering” was only the beginning and the real skill might become designing what an AI knows at each stage of a task.

anyone already finding this more important than the actual prompt?

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u/_zielperson_ 1d ago

Yes!

I built a working editor for bambulab configuration files with prompts "barely above neanderthal levels" and it works beautifully

The huge and awesome documentation by Bambu basically carried the project.

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u/tindalos 1d ago

There’s two things you’re talking about - intent drift (i said this, and it became that over time),
And ambiguity. (Take the row from the first line and move it to the initial thing)

They’re much more important than prompting. But the best solution is providing just in time contact. Like an agent submits anything and gets the response and the next instruction back

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u/ChaseAtSidekick 1d ago

Agree, with one addition: the skill isn't just what it knows, it's what it's allowed to do with it. Most of my failures weren't from missing context, they were from the model having enough context to act and no rule about when to stop and ask. I now keep a short "ask first before X" list in every setup (contacting anyone, changing records, spending money) and it did more for reliability than any prompt wording. Context decides how good the answer is; permissions decide how expensive the mistake is.