Tech Industry Renames Prompt Engineering
Also Xfinity Watches You Breathe and Apple Gets Sued

The Context Engineering Memo, Or: What is a Document

The latest official memo from the executive floor of the AI department has dropped, confirming what we all suspected; the highly-touted 'Prompt Engineering' job title is officially deprecated. The new mandatory skill is now Context Engineering, which sounds complex and important.

A quick review of the new best practices reveals that Context Engineering is essentially the high-value, highly-compensated process of finding the right documents and then carefully copying and pasting them into the large language model's input box. If you were doing 'prompting' before, you were merely asking the model to look at the wrong binder; now, as a Context Engineer, you are responsible for making sure the model has the correct binder, the full meeting notes, and maybe a sticky note. The entire field is currently in an existential spiral over the fact that their 'new idea' is just the quality of the training data all along; it seems even AIs are only as good as the internal documentation we provide them, which explains a lot about the current state of things.

The Custodian Versus The Landlord

The petty fight over who gets to charge for access to the corporate vending machine has escalated this week, with Proton joining an official antitrust suit against Apple. Proton, which manages email and VPN services, states that Apple is actively engaged in practices that harm both developers and end users by essentially double-charging everyone.

This is a classic 'Landlord Apple' scenario; Apple owns the office building, the App Store, and insists on collecting 30 percent of the lunch money from every other tenant, including the ones who provide the basic utility services like secure email. Apple claims it is providing a 'curated, premium experience'; Proton is saying Apple is just sitting on the fire exit and charging a toll. We are all rooting for the small guy in this corporate sibling rivalry, but we all know that the Landlord is very good at burying documents and citing obscure lease clauses from 2007.

Comcast Installs Break Room Surveillance

Comcast, operating under the Xfinity brand, has rolled out a new 'feature' that confirms everyone's deepest suspicions about their home network. The system, called WiFi Motion, uses the disturbances in the Wi-Fi signal to detect movement in your house. The official goal is home security, but the real-world application is that your router now knows exactly when you got up to make that fourth cup of coffee and whether it was a 'fast walk' or a 'leisurely stroll' to the bathroom.

The whole system is a stunning piece of benevolent incompetence; Xfinity is trying to be helpful by letting its router watch you, but it seems users are worried that the device cannot tell the difference between a housecat and a burglar, or whether it will start charging extra for 'High Movement Days' in a truly Comcast move. Just remember that the IT department is now getting motion logs from your living room, which is somehow less invasive than the time they made everyone use Microsoft Teams.

Briefs

• HR Fiasco: Microsoft will delete saved passwords from its Authenticator app next month. Microsoft is once again consolidating the good staplers; this time, they are throwing everyone's key cabinet in the dumpster to 'streamline operations.'
• Physical Version Control: The modular storage system known as Gridfinity is gaining traction. This is the only type of 'open source' project that actually makes sense; the core function is the organization of cable ties and spare desk parts, which is a universally understood problem.
• Unexpected Legacy Code: A Melbourne man discovered an extensive model train network hidden underneath his newly bought house. This is the physical representation of every ancient system administration job; someone built an incredibly complex, lovingly detailed, totally undocumented system and then quietly retired without telling anyone it existed.