Lance Martin
speaker
624 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2025
last heard Sep 2025
Lance Martin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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great to be here.
I'm a longtime listener of the pod and it's finally great to be on.
it?
Well, you know, it's funny.
Buzzwords emerge oftentimes when people have a shared experience.
And I think lots of people started building agents kind of early this year, mid this year, quote unquote, the year of agents.
And I think what happened is when you kind of put together an agent, it's just tool calling a loop.
It's relatively simple to lay out.
But it's actually quite tricky to get it to work well.
And in particular, managing contacts with agents is a hard problem.
Karpathy put out that tweet canonizing the term context engineering, and he kind of mentioned this nice definition, which is context engineering is the challenge of feeding an LM just the right context for the next step, which is highly applicable to agents.
And I think that really resonated with a lot of people.
I, in particular, had that experience over the past year working on agents, and I wrote about that a little bit in my piece talking about building open, deep research over the past year.
So I think it was kind of an interesting point that the term captured a common experience that many people were having, and it took hold because of that.
Well, I think that prompt engineering is kind of a subset of context engineering.
I think when we kind of move from chat models and chat interactions to agents, there's a big shift that occurred.
So with chat models, working with ChatGPT, the human message is really the primary input.
And, of course, a lot of time and effort is spent in crafting the right message that's passed to the model.
With agents, the game is a bit trickier, though, because the agents get in context not just from the human, but now context is flowing in from tool calls during the agent trajectory.
And so I think this was really the key challenge that I observed and many people observed is like, oof, when you put together an agent, you're not only managing, of course, the system instructions, system prompt, and of course, user instructions, you also have to manage all this context that's flowing in at each step over the course of a large number of tool calls.
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