← All IntelClip / EntertainmentContext engineering becomes minimalism with newer models
From Reflecting on a Year of Claude Code (Boris Cherny) · ≈16:12
“You give it the minimal possible system prompt, the minimal possible tools, and then you let the model figure it out.”
“I'm a context minimalist, so my general philosophy is tell the model only what it needs to know and let it figure out the rest of it.”
“I think when you give the model too much context, it's kind of like you're micromanaging it.”
What’s in it
- Why prompt/context engineering fades as models get smarter
- The case for 'context minimalism' when steering coding agents
- How leaner harnesses leave more room for your own prompts
Clip transcript
especially in a large enterprise? This is a thing. You know, people used to talk about prompt engineering. They used to like work context engineering. This is sort of matching where the model was at the time. Back in the days of Sonnet 3.5, you had to prompt engineer back in the days of Opus 4, you had to context engineer. But with the models of today, you don't do any of this. You give it the minimal possible system prompt, the minimal possible tools, and then you let the model figure it out. Like you just have to give the model some way to pull in the context. I think that's the most important thing. How do you think about it? I see things very similarly. I'm a context minimalist, so my general philosophy is tell the model only what it needs to know and let it figure out the rest of it. I think when you give the model too much context, it's kind of like you're micromanaging it. And sometimes the model knows a better way to get to the same outcome. And I personally prefer to give the model that freedom to do that. And then in general, we're also making our harness more lean so that you have more room for your own prompts. And so that follows your prompts better. There's all these different ways to Claude now,
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