I've been thinking about this lately because I feel like people use the term "prompt engineering" to describe two very different things. On one end, you have what most people are familiar with: A person opens ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc., and writes a carefully structured prompt. They define a role, provide context, establish goals, set constraints, maybe include examples, and iterate until they get the output they want. Most people seem to call this prompt engineering. But on the other end, when I'm building AI systems, prompt engineering looks completely different. The prompt isn't really a prompt anymore. It's much more of a dynamic pipeline. Variables are injected from databases, user input, APIs, previous conversations, tools, memory systems, retrieval systems, business rules, and workflow state. Decision trees determine which instructions are included and which are excluded. Prompts become assembled in real time based on context.…