There's a mass delusion happening in tech right now: thousands of people are listing "Prompt Engineering" as a skill on their LinkedIn profiles.

I'm going to say what a lot of people are thinking but few are willing to write: prompt engineering is not a skill. It never was.

What Prompt Engineering Actually Is

Let me define what we're talking about. "Prompt engineering" usually means:

Adding "think step by step" to your queries

Writing "you are an expert in X" before your question

Using specific formatting instructions like "respond in JSON"

Chain-of-thought prompting

Few-shot examples

These aren't skills. These are workarounds for models that weren't good enough yet.

The Evidence Is Already Here

Two years ago, you needed a carefully crafted 500-word prompt to get Claude or GPT to write decent code. Today? "Build me a React dashboard with authentication" works just fine.

The pattern is clear: as models improve, the elaborate prompt tricks become unnecessary.…