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.…