The Shift from Prompt Engineering to Intent Engineering in Human-AI Communication

Summary

Unite.AI explores the conceptual evolution from prompt engineering — the practice of carefully crafting specific text inputs to get desired outputs from language models — to what the article terms 'intent engineering,' a broader discipline focused on communicating goals, constraints, and context to increasingly capable AI systems. The piece argues that as models become more sophisticated and agentic, the emphasis is shifting from syntactic tricks and token-level manipulation toward higher-level