Prompt Engineering Skills: Irrelevant

It was just two years ago, that advanced prompt engineering was a skill I had, that set me apart from 90% of the businessworld. I wrote about and even consulted with clients on business and legal-specific prompt engineering.

We prompt engineers were self-styled alchemists who turned clever phrasing into productivity gold. LinkedIn profiles lit up like Christmas trees with titles like "Prompt Whisperer" and "AI Prompt Specialist." Tech recruiters tripped over themselves trying to snag anyone who could coax a halfway decent haiku out of ChatGPT.

Fast-forward to today? The party's over. The disco ball has dimmed. And "prompt engineering" now ranks somewhere between fax repair and MySpace development on the scale of career relevance.

Today, prompt design isn’t a job. It’s a bullet point. A line on a resume. Like knowing how to unjam a printer or build a decent PowerPoint. Still useful, but no one’s hiring you just for that. Especially not when the AI you're prompting can now generate its own prompts.

This is the inevitable fate of skills that live between novelty and utility. Prompt engineering is quickly joining the ranks of “Excel ninja” and “Photoshop wizard” - once-hyped micro-specialties that ultimately got folded into broader roles.

Likewise, crafting a killer prompt is now baked into every AI-driven role, from marketing to legal ops to IT support. And that’s the point. AI isn’t inventing jobs. It’s absorbing them. Devouring them. Assimilating them like a digital Borg with a taste for middle management. It’s not creating brand-new career paths so much as it’s streamlining the ones that already exist. AI jobs aren’t a new category. They’re just jobs, now powered by tools that can finish your thought before you even have it.

For the prompt engineers still clinging to relevance—there’s hope, but it’s more mountain pass than golden escalator. The future lies in building custom LLMs, not babysitting those that already exist.

The real winners? AI founders and consultants. Especially those who can translate Geek into Speak, so that decision makers can actually understand what they’re offering, without feeling intimidated by the tech.

So, was prompt engineering ever real? Sure. I created some of the best prompts in the legal field! The Prompt Engineer role existed, briefly. It had its moment. But now it’s time to as always, crystal ball and scry the future. What’s next? Agentic AI Task Creation and Management. At least, until Agentic AI takes over that role.

Cheers,

Frederick