Most engineers I know use Midjourney the same way they use ChatGPT: write a sentence describing the thing, hit enter, accept the output. This is why every README banner, every blog hero image, every product mockup AI-generated by a dev looks like it was AI-generated by a dev. Soft lighting. Vague subject. Cinematic-ish but not really cinematic. The five-finger giveaway has been mostly fixed; the prompt-illiteracy giveaway hasn't. Midjourney is not a language model wearing an image-generation hat. It's a camera with a strong stylistic prior . Prompting it like ChatGPT — natural-language paragraph, no parameters, no specific references — is like buying a DSLR and only ever using auto mode. It works. It also wastes about 80% of what the tool can actually do. This post is for engineers who use Midjourney occasionally for work artifacts (README banners, marketing assets, mockups, blog illustrations) and want to stop generating slop without becoming a full-time prompt engineer. Six components.…