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8 articles on Prompt Engineering, written from production systems rather than documentation.
Asking a model to reason step by step improves some tasks and slows every one of them. The trade is latency and tokens, paid on every single call.
Prompt engineering asks what to say to the model. Context engineering asks what should be in front of it at all, which is the harder half.
Examples are the fastest way to fix a format problem and a slow way to fix a reasoning one. Adding more has a ceiling that arrives earlier than expected.
A prompt is a load-bearing configuration string with no type checker behind it. Changing one line can break behaviour nobody remembers depending on.
Asking politely for JSON works most of the time, and most of the time is a poor guarantee for something a parser sits behind in production.
A system prompt is the one piece of a feature everybody edits and nobody owns. Structure decides whether it stays coherent or becomes sediment.
Three settings control the same thing from different angles. Turning all of them is how teams get output that is either rigid or quietly unhinged.
Reason, act, observe, repeat is the shape almost every agent uses. Its weaknesses are structural, and they show up in the same three places every time.
Whether it needs designing from scratch or rescuing from its own success, tell me what you’re building and I’ll tell you how I’d architect it.
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