Prompt engineering is just… engineering

Prompt engineering isn't a new discipline. It's an old one wearing a hoodie. The moment a prompt does something important, all the unglamorous engineering habits come straight back.

The boring parts didn't disappear

A prompt that ships is code. It needs a version, a place to live, and a note explaining why it says what it says. Change one line and you've changed the behaviour of a system — so treat it like a change, not a whim. Keep the old one. Write down what you expected to happen.

Talking to a model doesn't excuse you from measuring whether it worked.

Treat prompts like code

Build a tiny evaluation set before you tune anything: ten inputs, the answers you actually want, and a way to compare runs. It feels like overkill for a paragraph of English until the day a "small tweak" quietly breaks half your outputs and the eval catches it in seconds.

The tools are new. The engineering is not. That's good news — it means we already know how to do this well.