Karpathy Said Kill Prompt Engineering. Here’s What He Actually Meant.

The internet declared a funeral. The body wasn’t dead. Last June, Andrej Karpathy - former Tesla AI director, OpenAI co-founder, and one of the few people in the field whose offhand posts routinely restructure how thousands of developers work - posted something that landed like a scheduled lition. “+1 for ‘context engineering’ over ‘prompt engineering,’” he wrote on X. “People associate prompts with short task descriptions you’d give an LLM in your day-to-day use.