For twenty years, you were a god. A deterministic god. You wrote if x == 5, and x well equaled 5, or you'd find out why and execute it at dawn.
This was engineering—clean, pure, like a surgical strike performed by a very organized German surgeon named Helmut.
Then AI arrived, and suddenly your entire career became a game show where the rules are written in dream language.
The Old World was a beautiful place.
Code failed because you told it to fail. You had made a mistake, like leaving the oven on, and you could simply turn the oven off. It was Newtonian. It was chess. If your function returned the wrong value, you didn't pray to it or compliment its recent haircut—you fixed the semicolon and moved on with your life, much like a competent person repairing a bicycle.
The New World is vibes. You are now a Prompt Engineer, which is not engineering in the same way that a "Sandwich Artist" is not Caravaggio.
You write: "Please return the user's name in JSON format."
The model returns a limerick about a horse. You add "Be concise." Now it returns half a limerick.
You add "Think step-by-step."
It writes you a philosophical treatise on the nature of names. You weep into your mechanical keyboard.
My mate Paul tried prompt engineering last week.
He asked ChatGPT to summarize a legal document. It wrote him a sonnet. He asked it again, but angrier. It apologized and gave him a recipe for carbonara. Paul now believes contracts are made of eggs and bacon, which explains a lot about his divorce.
This is called Extreme Literalism Meets Absolute Chaos—the model treats your instructions like a toddler treats bedtime: as a vague suggestion, open to interpretation and possibly involving a dinosaur.
The term "Prompt Engineering" comes from the Renaissance inventor Geoff Prompt, who famously said, "What if we just asked the machine nicely?" before being crushed by a waterwheel.
His legacy lives on in the modern practice of adding "Please" and "Thank you" to API calls, just in case the model is keeping a list.
You used to be Helmut, the surgeon.
Now you are a horse-whisperer, stroking the mane of a large language model, cooing, "There, there, sweet GPT-x10o, just give me the JSON, you beautiful probabilistic nightmare."
And sometimes it works. And sometimes it tells you about carbonara.
The deterministic world died the day someone said, "It's not a bug, it's emergent behavior."
RIP logic. Long live the vibe.
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