Why prompt engineering will never die:
Every few months, someone declares prompt engineering dead. First it was "context engineering" that replaced it. Then "agent harnesses." Now some argue models will get so smart you won't need prompts at all. I think this is wrong, and I think the reason is that people misunderstand what prompt engineering actually is.
When people hear "prompt engineering," they picture alchemy. Special tricks to make the LLM behave. Phrases like "solve this or I'll die" that somehow improve outputs. With older models, some of that worked. New models don't need any of it. You can write plain English with typos and they'll understand you fine. So if that's your definition, then sure, it's dead.
But that was never what prompt engineering was really about.
An LLM, even a very powerful one, is like a genius on their first day at a new job. Brilliant, maybe smarter than everyone in the room. But they know nothing about your company, your product, or how you want things done. Your job is to explain all of that. What counts as a technical question versus a billing question. What tone to use. What your brand guidelines are. What coding conventions you follow. What's off-limits.
Writing all of this down, iterating until the AI behaves the way you want, is prompt engineering. If you've ever written a PRD, this should sound familiar. You're describing how a system should behave, what the flows look like, what the edge cases are. Except the system is an AI.
Context engineering still matters. But deciding what the AI should do with that context is the harder problem, and that's prompt engineering.
Prompt engineering isn't dead. We just had the wrong definition.