Everyone's Upgrading From Prompt Engineer to Context Engineer. They're Still Missing the Point.

A new title is going around. Context engineer. Not "prompt engineer." That one is getting retired. The people who took it seriously two years ago are now quietly rebranding. Context engineering is the upgrade. The idea is that better results do not come from better prompts, they come from better context. You feed the model more relevant information, you structure that information well, you stop asking questions and start building environments. That part is correct. It is also not enough. I have been building AI systems since before context engineering had a name. I watched the prompt engineering era peak and decline. I watched the "context is king" thesis take over. And I am watching the same ceiling hit the same people who thought upgrading the input layer would fix everything. It does not. What Prompt Engineering Actually Was Prompt engineering started as a genuine skill. Not everything that called itself prompt engineering was, but the real version had discipline in it. You learned