Prompt engineering is really more like the art of exploring the emergent behavior of the LLMs. Unlike traditional software that has known features and capabilities. We build a model and then we literally don't know what it does until we explore it.

I wrote a response to this argument here: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Feb/21/in-defense-of-prompt-e...

Short version: I think prompt engineering will be an important skill for a very long time. Using these systems to the maximum of their (currently unknown) potential will always involve expert knowledge!

As long as language is used, prompt engineering will always be a thing. The term "prompt engineering" is just a fancy way of describing being a good communicator.

Communication is basically prompt engineering.

You can say whatever you like and live with the results, or try to phrase your communication in a way that elicits the kind of response you want from the other party.

We’ve engineered it away with computers where we learn a programming language or the rules of an operating system and the acceptable input is translated into a deterministic result.

But natural language is much more creative and open ended.

Advances seem to make some of the hacks less necessary (such as CoT behaving better with newlines), but precisely specifying what you want will always be useful.

It pretty much seems like it, as this is the infancy of LLM UX.

Prompt “engineering” currently reeks of the A in STEAM