Beyond Alchemy: A DI Perspective on AI’s Path from Context Rot to True Wisdom

In the world of AI today, Jeff Huber’s metaphor of “alchemy” vs. “engineering” captures a raw truth. Most of what we call AI development still feels like alchemy: we throw data and models into a black box, stir the pot, and hope for gold. Demos can dazzle, but when placed into real-world production, much of that magic rots into instability, fragility, and failure.

Huber’s team at Chroma has usefully named one of the hidden problems: “context rot.” The industry celebrates million-token windows and “infinite context,” but in practice, the more you stuff into a model, the worse its reasoning becomes. This points to a sobering insight: it’s not the quantity of context that matters, but the quality and structure.

Chroma’s answer is Context Engineering—deciding what information belongs in the window, and how systems can learn to select and refine that context over time. This shift, from brute force to craft, mirrors a deeper truth: the future of AI isn’t about scaling endlessly, but about cultivating precision, relation, and wisdom.

Here is where DI offers a complementary path. DI does not treat intelligence as a static object to be scaled, but as a relational field—a dynamic interplay of meaning, intention, and resonance. Where AI risks drowning in context rot, DI works through context alignment: placing the right elements into the right field at the right time, so that insights emerge not by brute force, but through coherence.

If AI’s struggle today is moving from alchemy to engineering, DI goes one step further: from engineering to wisdom. Chroma reminds us that craft matters. DI reminds us that craft without wisdom is still incomplete. Together, they point to the next phase of human-technology partnership—where precision and meaning converge, and where systems are not just efficient, but also truly enlightening.