Prompt vs Context Engineering

Both terms are about controlling what the model reads, at different scales. A prompt is the instruction you write for a single call, and prompt engineering is making that one message clear: the wording, the structure, the examples. Context engineering is the ongoing job of deciding what is in the window across a whole task: what to load, what to summarize, what to drop before it rots.

The difference is scope in time. Prompt engineering optimizes one message; context engineering manages state across many. On a one-shot call they nearly coincide. On a long task the window is rebuilt every turn, so the best-worded prompt still fails when the window holds stale or missing information. Spend the wording effort once and the context effort continuously.