About whether getting good LLM output really requires special context-engineering skills.
Has this happened?
Yes 28 (27%)Not sure 28 (27%)No 49 (47%)
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?
About whether getting good LLM output really requires special context-engineering skills.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
That might be the case, but these tools are marketed as having close to superhuman intelligence, with the strong implication that AGI is right around the corner. It's obvious that engineering work is required to get them to perform certain tasks, which is what the agentic trend is about. What's not so obvious is the fact that getting them to generate correct output requires some special skills or tricks. If these tools were truly intelligent and capable of reasoning, surely they would be able to inform human users when they lack contextual information instead of confidently generating garbage, and their success rate would be greater than 35%[1].
The idea that fixing this is just a matter of providing better training and contextual data, more compute or plumbing, is deeply flawed.
[1]: https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/29/ai_agents_fail_a_lot/