In the rush to get the most from AI tools, prompt engineering—the practice of writing clear, structured inputs that guide an AI tool’s output—has taken center stage. But for software engineers, the skill isn’t new. We’ve been doing a version of it for decades, just under a different name. The challenges we face when writing AI prompts are the same ones software teams have been grappling with for generations. Talking about prompt engineering today is really just continuing a much older conversation about how developers spell out what they need built, under what conditions, with what assumptions, and how to communicate that to the team.
