Extending the Bitter Lesson: Prompt Engineering is Temporary Scaffolding
alex_verem · x · 2026-07-14
Drawing on Rich Sutton’s classic essay The Bitter Lesson, the author explores the future of prompt engineering. As model compute power and capabilities grow, manually crafted, complex step-by-step instructions will eventually become obsolete.
- Intent Engineering: Daniel Miessler suggests stopping the practice of writing detailed, step-by-step instructions for AI, and instead describing the desired end result.
- Scaffolding Mindset: The author argues that all carefully tuned system prompts and workflows are merely "temporary patches" for current, less intelligent models. As models evolve, these complex prompts will become redundant.
- Irreplaceable Value: Although specific prompting techniques will depreciate, a human's understanding of real business needs, the taste to judge AI output quality, and domain expertise remain core moats that are hard to replace with sheer compute.
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