  In this article I summarize recent progress in the effective field theory
approach to low energy nuclear systems, with a focus on the power counting
issue. In the pionless sector, where the power counting is quite well
understood at the nucleon-nucleon (NN) level, I discuss some recent
developments toward few- and many-body calculations. In the pionful sector, I
focus on the actively debated issue of power counting in the NN sector and some
recent developments toward a model-independent NN interaction. Finally, the
scenario that the power counting might depend on the number of particles is
discussed.
