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AI Programming

Prompt Engineering is Quickly Going Extinct (fastcompany.com) 71

Posted by msmash from the eatings-its-own dept.
The specialized role of prompt engineering, not long ago heralded as a promising new career path in AI, has virtually disappeared just two years after its emergence. Many companies are now considering strong AI prompting a standard skill rather than a dedicated position, Fast Company reports, with some firms even deploying AI systems to generate optimal prompts for other AI tools.

"AI is already eating its own," Malcolm Frank, CEO of TalentGenius, told the publication. "Prompt engineering has become something that's embedded in almost every role, and people know how to do it. It's turned from a job into a task very, very quickly." The prompt engineer's decline serves as a case study for the broader AI job market, where evidence suggests AI is primarily reshaping existing careers rather than creating entirely new ones.

Further reading: 'AI Prompt Engineering Is Dead.'

Prompt Engineering is Quickly Going Extinct More | Reply

Prompt Engineering is Quickly Going Extinct

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  • "We used to buy catalogs of computer stuff." (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Pseudonymous Powers ( 4097097 ) on Friday May 09, 2025 @11:23AM (#65364155)
    Anybody remember when talking about computer technology was fun?

    • Re: "We used to buy catalogs of computer stuff." (Score:5, Informative)

      by zawarski ( 1381571 ) on Friday May 09, 2025 @11:33AM (#65364175)
      Old enough to remember it has a name https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hey! ( 33014 )

      Back when nerds drove technology, not plutocrats.

      One can date the exact point at which this stopped being fun, it was the day Mark Zuckerberg said "Privacy is dead. Get over it."

      • Buying catalogs is not exactly a consumer-friendly business model.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        One can date the exact point at which this stopped being fun, it was the day Mark Zuckerberg said "Privacy is dead. Get over it."/blockquote

        Except there never was any privacy. Even in the BBS days the saying was "Never post online anything you don't want to see on the New York Times tomorrow". Basically there is nothing private and anything you post should be considered viewable by everyone else.

        Mark was just speaking the truth - there is no privacy.

        The only reason he implemented privacy controls was he dis

        • Mark was just speaking the truth - there is no privacy.

          There was anonymity. Before Facebook, the rule was that you never posted any personal information. You never used your real name anywhere, and you never told anyone anything about yourself beyond broad generalizations.

          Now, you could argue that with data scraping broad generalizations are still enough to compromise your privacy. There's no such thing as anonymous data, after all. But data scraping is also new. (newish. compared to the old internet anyway.)

          So I'd blame Facebook for some of our present,

    • Indeed. Remember Byte Magazine? It used to be fun to read about computer technology too.

      • Indeed. Remember Byte Magazine? It used to be fun to read about computer technology too.

        I met Jerry Pournelle in the press room at a computer show years ago. I was writing a computer column for a local newspaper, and I remarked how I enjoyed Chaos Manor and copied some of his style. He remarked, lighteartedly, “No, you stole. Professional steal, only amateurs copy’

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by antdude ( 79039 )

      Yes. :( I wonder if the younger generations are enjoying the modern computer tech.

  • And that's most of the food it will get for a while.

  • Just common sense (Score:2, Interesting)

    by fabiomb ( 5315421 )
    Prompt engineering it's just learn to express things by yourself, it means you need to write exactly what you want and any LLM will understand you. The catch? Many juniors can't write what they want, they doesn't care about reading or writing, so... in the short term oldies will keep their jobs. If you had a good education and are not an alienated introvert, you'll be an "expert" with AI, just because you understand a problem and can ask, full of details, what you really want.

    • It's kind of the same skill required for writing requirements / stories: the ability to write out what you actually want, in a way that others can read it and understand.

      That's as opposed to requests from executives like "Can you make a dashboard to helps me understand what's going on with our sales?"

  • Prompt Engineering was only a vehicle for bloggers to talk about ChatGPT.

  • Webmasters all over again (Score:5, Informative)

    by vadim_t ( 324782 ) on Friday May 09, 2025 @12:07PM (#65364257) Homepage

    I remember there was a short time when the web was new and "webmaster" was a profitable occupation. Then a combination of improved web design software, CMSes, frameworks and the like quickly ate the low end, and the higher end just got rolled into software development.

    I'm not sure why anyone thought that knowing what keywords a specific model recognizes best could ever be an enduring form of employment. To me it was always clearly extremely temporary.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by allo ( 1728082 )

      Don't you think most websites still have a webmaster (or serveral)? It's not like things don't need work anymore.

      • I mean on the low end.

        Like formerly a small business would pay for the valuable HTML and FTP knowledge, but today many will just use Wix instead.

        And more complex things are more proper webdev and not just knowing some HTML tags.

    • Also note that prompt engineering was based on the assumption that AI systems don't handle requests well unless those requests are very carefully worded. That assumption was true, but it was never going to last.

      It is basically an assumption that AI will always be so dumb that only an expert can get good results. But literally every aspect of prompt engineering can be trivially converted into a feature request from the AI product managers to the AI development team, and AI developers are competing to solve t

  • Wow. I think I'll engineer a sandwich.
    After lunch, I'll engineer the lawn with a lawnmower.
    Hey, Engineers, we're all engineers now.
    Thanks AI for devaluing the meaning of words

    A 'standard' skill? You mean like asking a question?
    Actually, I'm thinking people asking meaningful and deep questions is beyond more and more people everyday as they lose their fucking minds to ChatGPT.
    Dear ChatGPT, design build and deploy me a social media juggernaut, that looks just like Facebook but make the backgrounds black and c

    • Wow. I think I'll engineer a sandwich. After lunch, I'll engineer the lawn with a lawnmower. Hey, Engineers, we're all engineers now. Thanks AI for devaluing the meaning of words A 'standard' skill? You mean like asking a question? Actually, I'm thinking people asking meaningful and deep questions is beyond more and more people everyday as they lose their fucking minds to ChatGPT. Dear ChatGPT, design build and deploy me a social media juggernaut, that looks just like Facebook but make the backgrounds black and call it Spacebook. I'll be out back engineering the lawn.

      Dude, sanitation engineer has been a thing for almost twenty years. Blaming AI for devaluing the meaning of engineer is like blaming a toddler for the state of the current world we live in.

      • Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)

        by sarren1901 ( 5415506 )

        Well, there is a particular toddler many do blame...

      • No AI didn't devalue the meaning of the word "Engineer" it was hopped up programmers 20 years ago that thought they were the equivalent of hardware engineers let alone the big "E" graduate program grads without a single math or science class to there name.

        Show me a programmer that can do advanced math and I guarantee it's someone with a math degree pretending to be a programmer.

    • I live in a state that only recently allowed the common pleb to pump their own gasoline at a retail pump. Previous to that law changing, I always joked about needing a "fuel transfer engineer" to do the critical job of making sure that gasoline gets transferred to the vehicle without the hose going wild and spraying volatile flammable liquids over half the property and present people.

      But somehow if I drive over a fairly large bridge, I gain the ability to do that myself safely. And lose it again when I co

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      "Software engineering" already did that.

    • Thanks AI for devaluing the meaning of words

      This is one thing we can't really blame "AI" for - it's been going on for as long as I've been alive, and probably longer. And it's bigger than just the moniker "engineer", although that has definitely been significantly over-used.

      • I would suggest a simple inverse relationship between the meaning and the number of words published. It's like inflation in the economic domain. If you print more money, each dollar is worth less. Same here I suggest, as generative AI pumps out repurposed garbage as fast as possible, it devalues meaning. Once 100% of the internet is repurposed garbage, generated sites, then it's worth is 0. I'm suggesting the internet dun it.

        • If you print more money, each dollar is worth less.

          This narrowly ignorant understanding is, I think, the cause of so many stupid opinions.

          If you don't print more, each dollar is worth more and more.
          This probably sounds like a good thing to you. Hide that money under your mattress and it gains value!

          What happens when everyone does that?

          Economies are not static. Money supply is a highly complicated system.
          Then again, this isn't terribly surprising coming from someone that doesn't know the definition of the word "engineer", or know that it has been "de

          • Did you become a pedantic cunt before you went to a College of Engineering or after?
            • I'd say it didn't help ;)

              But who would you rather having doing technical tasks? Someone pedantic, or someone who doesn't understand the basic concepts underpinning what they're opining upon?

              That's why I'm paid a fuckton of money as a Chief Engineer whose job consists mostly of software and network engineering, and you make my fries.
              • Jesus .. relax a bit ... I heard Oregon has or had some of the best weed ... you need some.
                but anyway, competence is high on my list of respectable qualities
                don't make me psychoanalyze you though, most poeple hate it , including me ..
                this is over, lets see now
                printing money doesn't cause inflation?
                • If your skills in psychoanalysis are as bad as your reasoning and basic English skills, I'm not terribly worried.

                  printing money doesn't cause inflation?

                  Is the demand for economic growth and subsequent increase in supplied produced goods and services static?
                  What, if I may ask, do you think the correct amount of money for there to be is? Does it never go up? Is the best amount zero, then?

                  It's pretty clear you only graduated highschool by the skin of your teeth, so I'd go ahead and fuck off now.

    • Dear ChatGPT, design build and deploy me a social media juggernaut, that looks just like Facebook but make the backgrounds black and call it Spacebook.

      "Sounds like a fun project!"

      "Yes, I can build you a glorified multi-user blog. Let's break this down ... "

  • A key quality of models is prompt understanding and the goal is that the model should be able to grasp any prompt that contains all required information.
    Of course you can still achieve something by writing a better structured prompt, but that's indeed something you should learn by trying and not by studying "prompt engineering".

    I wonder if we will have in a few years a trend to train models on some kind of programming language to communicate tasks more clearly than plain English can. On the other hand, prom

    • We used to write structured English. Remove all modifiers like adverbs, and retain only nouns and verbs. Meaning is often clearer. Most people use to many extra words.

      • And don't know the difference between two, too, and to. ;)

      • We used to write structured English. Remove all modifiers like adverbs, and retain only nouns and verbs. Meaning is often clearer. Most people use to many extra words.

        Classic.

        • phone, autocorrect, fuck off
          pedantic cunt fits you perfectly
          • LOL- no phone autocorrected too to to.

            No one is laughing at you because you made an English mistake... however, making that mistake while complaining that people don't use English correctly- that's chef's kiss, you have to admit.

            But then trying to bullshit your way out of the mistake? That's just fucking sad, lol

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by allo ( 1728082 )

        Most people use to many extra words.

        Just as the LLM answers. Every creative writing is overloaded with adverbs and adjectives.

  • Sorry, I can't keep up with all the latest fads.

  • This is what it was like writing Google search queries 10 years ago. Most people have no idea how to write a good search query and it was a desirable skill. It's still a hard skill to develop, but search engines have adapted to the bad queries. The same is already happening with LLMs.

    I can still find things using Google that other people would never be able to craft the right query for, but that level isn't what is being expected of people as a basic work skill. It's not even expected of anybody. Peopl

  • I never understood.. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Junta ( 36770 ) on Friday May 09, 2025 @01:01PM (#65364395)

    Why anyone thought that was going to be a 'skill'.

    The whole point of the prompt is that it's a low skill interface. If it did require skills, then it's missing the point.

    The skills to audit and do the work the LLM fails to do are non trivial, the natural language prompt piece is trivial.

    • Why anyone thought that was going to be a 'skill'.

      No it is objectively a skill. It's just not a career. People absolutely suck at expressing themselves. It is often very difficult to tease out of people what they actually want in a way that suits their purpose.

      The only thing different here is the skill is talking to a computer rather than a person, and we gave having good communication skills a cutsey name.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Hadlock ( 143607 )

      To get good use out of LLMs you need to provide adequate context and not mischaracterize the task. LLMs are getting better about recognizing when humans mischaracterize a task, or a step is skipped due to context of human language. Coding business apps is annoying/difficult because telling your assistant "forward these kinds of emails to the rental team" is easy and they'll navigate edge cases, but coding that is harder as you have to know the edge cases in advance. For example I just asked chatgpt for an e

  • The name of this phenomenon is called "accurately articulating what it is that you want", which is what it would have been called the first time if more people knew about it

  • ...there will only be engineering that takes its time.

  • "Prompt Engineering" never should have been a real job in the first place.

    That's probably why it's going away.

    Nothing has changed in the way prompts are used or given that would drive this except that it's not new and shiny anymore and people can't grift as much with and about it.

    Most people now go, "Oh wow, you know how to prompt ChatGPT, welcome to 2023."

  • During the .dot-com bust of 2001, I met a bartender in Manhattan who, just 2 years prior, was earning $90/hour as an HTML programmer. Yup, HTML programmer. If you want to know where today's "prompt engineers" will land in the coming months, check your local pub.

  • “The specialized role of prompt engineering, not long ago heralded as a promising new career path in AI, has virtually disappeared just two years after its emergence.”

    This is news to me. Especially as ChatAIs are notorious for halucinating references. Made-up quotes from made-up authors. Never mind designing a plane or nuclear reactor.

  • I only just updated my resume to show I had 10 years of prompt engineering experience as a spatial infrastructure optimization specialist at Taco Bell.

  • When I was in high school, Science Olympiad briefly had an event called "Searching the Web". It was about using a newfangled thing called a "search engine" to look up answers to various questions. I remember I hoped to get a "leg up" by using Metacrawler. (Its mascot was a spider with 8 legs, see?) I'd heard rumors about a great new search engine named after some large number, like maybe a googol, but I hadn't used it yet.

    I guess it's just a phase these things go through.

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