Prompt engineering isn't completely dead. If you're summarizing emails or classifying support tickets, a well-written system prompt still gets you 90% of the way there. But if you're building agents, and most of us are building agents now, prompt engineering is the wrong mental model. It's not the bottleneck anymore. The system around the model is. What Prompt Engineering Actually Was From 2022 to 2024, most AI work was "how do I phrase this to get better output." Few-shot examples, chain-of-thought prompting, temperature tuning. The skill was about poking a stateless model and getting a useful single-turn response. That made sense when models were barely reliable and the main interface was a text completion box. The best prompt engineers I knew were essentially UX designers for language models. The craft was real. But it was always a workaround for a gap between what models could do and what they needed to do. As models improved and workflows got mor...