Q: What is prompt engineering, and how do I write good prompts?

Prompt engineering means writing instructions that get reliable, high-quality results from a model. It's a real skill, but it's not magic incantations: it's technical writing plus knowing how models read.

The best guides are the ones the labs publish themselves, because they describe how their models were trained to behave: OpenAI's prompting guide and Anthropic's. Start there, not with YouTube "secret prompt" videos.

Is it a career? Mostly no. "Prompt engineer" as a standalone job title has largely faded: in an analysis of 1,000+ AI Engineer job descriptions, RAG (35.9%) appears more often than prompt engineering does. But prompting as a skill inside AI engineering is permanent: your system prompts, agent instructions, eval rubrics, and tool descriptions are all prompts, and the quality of your system tracks the quality of that writing.