> And what path would you recommend to young people who want to become programmers. Machine learning? Prompt engineering?

Become a software engineer and use the best tools available to you to learn and do your job. This means LLMs and everything that was available before them like search, stackoverflow, documentation, forums, books, courses etc.

You don't need to work on machine learning in order to take advantage of it.

"Prompt engineer" is a bunch of bs, stop trying to make it happen. The language models are a useful tool, they're not your job. It's as stupid as someone claiming to be an "IDE engineer" or a "stackoverflow engineer".