Actual engineers have professional standards bodies and legal liability when they shirk and the bridge falls down or the plane crashes or your wiring starts on fire.
Software "engineers" are none of those things but can at least emulate the approaches and strive for reproducibility and testability. Skilled craftsman; not engineers.
Prompt "engineers" is yet another few steps down the ladder, working out mostly by feel what magic words best tickle each model, and generally with no understanding of what's actually going on under the hood. Closer to a chef coming up with new meals for a restaurant than anything resembling engineering.
The battle on the use of language around engineer has long been lost but applying it to the subjective creative exercise of writing prompts is just more job title inflation. Something doesn't need to be engineering to be a legitimate job.
The battle on the use of language around engineer has long been lost
That's really the core of the issue: We're just having the age-old battle of prescriptivism vs descriptivism again. An "engineer", etymologically, is basically just "a person who comes up with stuff", one who is "ingenious". I'm tempted to say it's you prescriptivists who are making a "battle" out of this.
subjective creative exercise of writing prompts
Implying that there are no testable results, no objective success or failure states? Come on man.
If physical engineers understood everything then standards would not have changed in many decades. Safety factors would be mostly unnecessary. Clearly not the case.
If this was enough all novel creation would be engineering and that's clearly not true. Engineering attempts to discover & understand consistent outcomes when a myriad of variables are altered, and the boundaries where the variables exceed a model's predictive powers - then add buffer for the unknown. Manipulating prompts (and much of software development) attempts to control the model to limit the number of variables to obtain some form of useful abstraction. Physical engineering can't do this.
