Prompt Engineering Is a Job of the Past

You no longer have to ask what a prompt engineer does

A lot has been said about the jobs of the future. In fact, I wrote much of what has been said. From Robot Butler to Climate Refugees, I’ve covered it all. Mostly, I’ve talked about the jobs AI will create; those are the ones people are most curious about. One such AI job of the present and future has had many of us stumped for the past year or so: “prompt engineer.”

For a long time, my thinking on prompt engineering was as follows:

• Productized LLMs are a brand-new technology that people have not yet fully tamed
• Twitter reply guys have just been burnt by crypto and need a new grift
• They see AI emerge as the “next big thing”, but have no engineering or coding talent; they do, however, speak English (barely)
• They rebrand themselves as “prompt engineers” (sounds fancy! Looks good on LinkedIn!) and share obvious advice to “help” people get “the most out of ChatGPT”

If it doesn’t sound like a real job that someone might be paid to do, trust your instinct. The above is correct for a majority of the “prompt engineers” you see on social media. However, having spoken to actual experts, my thinking has evolved. The truth is closer to: