Everyone Is Calling It Prompt Engineering. They're Already Behind.

Let me tell you about a seven-word request that became 5,000 tokens. A developer opens Cursor and types: "Add error handling to this function." Seven words. That's the prompt. That's what the developer thinks they sent. Here's what actually got sent to the model: SYSTEM: You are an expert software engineer. Write clean, production-ready code. Follow the existing coding style. Use the same language and framework as the surrounding code. CONTEXT — Current file: [500-2,000 tokens of the file being edited] CONTEXT — Related files: [300-1,000 tokens from imported modules and type definitions] CONTEXT — Project structure: "This is a TypeScript/Next.js project using Prisma ORM." CONTEXT — Recent edits: [What the developer changed in the last 5 minutes] CONTEXT — Error messages: [Current terminal errors or linter warnings] USER: Add error handling to this function. The developer's seven words are sitting at the bottom of 3,000–5,000 tokens of injected context they never wrote and never saw. An