It’s not surprising to me that the same crowd that cheers for the demise of software engineering skills invented its own notion of AI prompting skills.

Too bad they can veer sharply into cringe territory pretty fast: “as an accomplished Senior Principal Engineer at a FAANG with 22 years of experience, create a todo list app.” It’s like interactive fanfiction.

Yes, this is cargo cult.

This remind me of so called "optimization" hacks that people keep applying years after their languages get improved to make them unnecessary or even harmful.

Maybe at one point it helped to write prompts in this weird way, but with all the progress going on both in the models and the harness if it's not obsolete yet it will soon be. Just crufts that consumes tokens and fills the context window for nothing.