Unpopular opinion: "Prompt Engineer" as a job title has maybe 18 months left.

Not because prompting doesn't matter — it absolutely does. But because it's being absorbed into everything else.

When every developer uses structured outputs, function calling, and tools like DSPy for prompt optimization, "prompt engineering" stops being a specialty and becomes a baseline skill. Like knowing Git.

What's actually emerging is something I'd call Prompt Architecture — designing systems that automatically generate the right prompt for the right context. Not writing individual prompts by hand, but building the infrastructure that handles prompting at scale.

The engineer who manually crafts beautiful prompts? Valuable today.

The engineer who builds systems that craft thousands of context-aware prompts automatically? Valuable forever.

If you're a prompt engineer, don't panic. But start learning the systems layer. That's where the career longevity lives.