Prompt engineering is not a job title
The skill isn't writing better prompts. It's knowing when the prompt is the wrong abstraction entirely.
Every few months the discourse around 'prompt engineering' shifts. First it was a superpower. Then a dead-end skill. Then a required competency for every developer. The oscillation is exhausting and mostly beside the point.
The real question isn't whether prompt engineering matters — it's what you're actually doing when you engineer a prompt. In most cases, what people call prompt engineering is actually specification engineering. You're not casting spells or finding magic words. You're specifying a task precisely enough that a probabilistic system behaves deterministically within the bounds you care about.
The engineers who are best at this don't spend time tweaking prompts. They spend time defining the task boundary — exactly what the model is responsible for and what happens at the edges — and then write the simplest prompt that expresses that boundary. The prompt is often boring. The thinking behind it isn't.