Prompt engineering oscillates between "trivial skill" and "dark art." Both are wrong.
Building production prompt pipelines is software engineering with additional constraints from non-determinism.
The discipline I apply: specify output format explicitly and validate it. Write few-shot examples covering edge cases, not just the happy path. Build a test suite probing boundary conditions. Monitor output quality in production with automated metrics.
The Sabivox support agent's prompt pipeline has 47 test cases. It failed 12 in the first version. Those failures were found in testing, not production.
Treat your prompts like code. Version them. Test them. Review changes to them.
— Dick Bassey | DevDick | 2024