Prompt engineering isn't dead — it just grew up
Why structured outputs, tool calling and evals matter more than clever phrasing in 2024.
The 'prompt engineering is dead' takes always come from people who never did the boring 80% of the job. Yes, models are smarter and require less hand-holding to produce good prose. No, that doesn't make the discipline obsolete — it shifts where the value is.
Modern prompt work is mostly schema design, tool-call orchestration, and eval-driven iteration. The interesting questions are 'what JSON shape should the model return so the rest of my system can trust it?' and 'how do I detect when this prompt regresses three releases from now?'.
Anyone who can answer those is doing prompt engineering whether they call it that or not. The job title may fade. The work is going nowhere.