Prompt engineering sounds like a buzzword, but it's one of the most important skills for an AI engineer in 2026. Getting a decent response out of ChatGPT is easy — getting reliable, consistent, structured output inside a production codebase is a completely different game.
If you've tried it, you know the pain. The skills that actually matter: writing system prompts that genuinely constrain a model's behavior, using function calling so the model returns structured data your code can use instead of plain text, and applying JSON mode and structured outputs for predictable, parsable responses every time.
The whole goal is getting models to do something reliably and consistently — not just once, but in production.
#techwithtim #aiengineer #ai #programming