Prompt Engineers help organisations use AI, but there is a common misconception about how they do that.
Most people think the key skill of a PE is writing AI prompts, but this is a fairly straightforward skill that most software developers can pick up in a short course. That’s not where a good PE will add value.
Instead, their key skill is in helping the organisation identify what opportunities there are for AI to add value, and helping people within the organisation formulate what they need with enough clarity to be able to create a prompt (or the combination of an AI prompt plus some other functions) to deliver that.
There are similar misconceptions about technical writers, for example. Many people think tech writers’ key skill is in typing words into a word processor and using good grammar, but this is not their key skill at all. The difficult part of technical writing is collecting information from disparate sources (often, from other people’s heads) and organising it in a way that will make sense. PEs do exactly the same thing, and in fact there are a number of excellent PEs who started their careers as technical writers, business analysts, instructional designers … people who don’t generally have coding skills.
As AI becomes more flexible, the need to use specific structures in prompts to help the LLM produce what you want will be less and less important, and the ability to get clarity around exactly what the organisation wants from the LLM will be paramount.
