engineering

Definition

The craft of making something actually work, as distinct from establishing a new theoretical result. In current usage it most often names the practice of getting more out of a fixed model by designing how it is used — prompt engineering, context engineering, evaluation harnesses, retrieval plumbing. Academic writing tends to undervalue it, but in deployed systems it is usually where the observed performance difference comes from.

Explainers using this term

• Paper Walkthrough: LoopArena — Benchmarking the Model That Steers a Coding AgentLoopArena: Benchmarking Models as Runtime Controllers for Loop Engineering
• Paper Walkthrough: SWE-bench Science — Can Coding Agents Fix Scientific Code?SWE-bench Science: Can Coding Agents Resolve Engineering Tasks in Science?
• Paper Deep-Dive: Frontis-MA1 — Training the AI That Builds AI: One Step Toward Recursive Self-Improvement in ML EngineeringFrontis-MA1: Training an AI4AI Model towards Recursive Self-Improvement in Machine Learning Engineering