Prompt Engineering and the Quiet Goodbye to Hand Coding

Seeing patterns and learning quickly; those are the remaining hallmarks of being a software engineer. Thatโ€™s how it seems to me.

Engineering was always about rapidly absorbing new information, making sense of novel (but strangely familiar looking) situations, before applying the โ€˜system under testโ€™ approach. Engineering college drilled that into us early on.

Unfortunately, none of that core engineering discipline ever really features on the CV in a highly competitive job market. Rather, technical skills and domain experience are the big flashing neon lights that employers look for.

Expert knowledge of Microsoft C# .Net has let me sleep well at night, knowing itโ€™s the ultimate trump card (excuse the pun) with my fellow non-technical BAs, and even on par with full-time developers. Until recently, that is.

Iโ€™ve been keenly watching advances in LLM driven development, and even the most die hard skeptics must be impressed by now. Seeing X recent shoot-em-up made entirely through prompting is certain proof.

The frame rate is laggy even on a decent GPU, but thatโ€™s beside the point. Just the fact that such a game could be created through prompting alone is where all our eyes should be.

Borland Delphi or Visual Basic come to mind when I think about shifts of a similar magnitude. These seem antiquated now, but for those who remember, the introduction of visual IDEs was massive.

I feel excited for the future but sad that another end to a major programming era is coming to a close, and perhaps a little glad Iโ€™m nearer to the end of my career, than the beginning.

I canโ€™t yet imagine a time when I wonโ€™t be hand coding C#, but itโ€™s feeling more like a Sunday night game of solitaire than laying down a full house in Vegas.

Woking, Surrey, GU22, United Kingdom