The phrase prompt engineering acquired a skeptical connotation early — something between a joke about talking to chatbots and a transitional skill that would be obsoleted as models improved. Neither characterization was accurate, and teams that dismissed it on those grounds have paid a real productivity cost. Prompting a code generation model effectively is a software discipline because it shares the fundamental characteristics of all software work: it requires precise specification of desired behavior, systematic handling of edge cases, and iterative refinement based on observed output.