Why would I believe that any of this works? This is just some blokes idea of what people should do.

There is no evidence offered. No attempt to measure the benefits.

Most of the inference techniques (what the author calls context engineering design patterns) listed here originally came from the research community, and there are tons of benchmarks measuring their effectiveness, as well as a great deal of research behind what is happening mechanistically with each.

As the author points out, many of the patterns are fundamentally about in-context learning, and this in particular has been subject to a ton of research from the mechanistic interpretability crew. If you're curious, I think this line of research is fascinating: https://transformer-circuits.pub/2022/in-context-learning-an...

Imagine the gall of someone who just goes on the internet and writes something.