What is context engineering and how is it different from prompt engineering?

Context engineering is a broader 2026 term covering everything that goes into the model's context window: system prompts, user input, retrieved documents, tool outputs, conversation history, and structured data. Prompt engineering focuses on the wording itself. As LLM applications grew more complex, context engineering emerged to describe the architectural decisions about what information enters the context, in what order, and how it is formatted.