Tools not prompts
Working on Sputnik Legal, it's really striking how at least my work in AI engineering has shifted definitively to tools, not prompts. People are surprised when I tell them we have an AI product for legal, and there are almost zero pre-written legal prompts in our backend. It's all tools. The process is:
Figure out a task to give the AI (with our beta clients)
Give it the task with very little context (the prompts are often just one sentence)
Watch it use the tools it has available
Figure out how to improve those tools (can we make them more precise? Less context-hungry? More generally useful?)
A lot of the tool thinking of the past 2 months has been: how can we reduce the amount of tools and make them more stackable, kind of like UNIX tools.
Let's not call it "tool engineering" (or worse, "agent UX") but it kind of is. Building things so that the agent can use it, assuming that the underlying models continue to get better at reasoning and tool use (a pretty safe bet).