If you don’t know how every token of input affects the output, is engineering an accurate way to describe what you’re doing?
Engineers have built systems based around things they didn't fully understand for centuries.
We have learned an enormous amount about materials engineering and metallurgy since building the Brooklyn Bridge for example.
If you don't fully understand how a system you are building on top of works, the engineering approach is to methodically experiment. That's what prompt engineering is.
(One argument that works for not calling prompt engineering "engineering" is to point out that in many disciplines engineering requires certifications and licensing - the same reason people sometimes argue against "software engineering" as an engineering discipline.)
edit: Which I feel is closer to prompt engineering than software engineering.
> If you don’t know how every token of input affects the output, is engineering an accurate way to describe what you’re doing?
We in fact don't know exactly. Prompt engineering seems to be a bag of tricks that change the probabilities of outputs. But I didn't invent the term.
Texts where someone has "centuries of experience" are likely to be fantasy or sci-fi, which bias against reliability.