Engineering tends to mean "the application of scientific and mathematical principles to practical ends".

I'm not sure there's much scientific or mathematical about guessing how a non-deterministic system will behave.

The moment you start building evaluation pipelines and running experiments to validate your ideas it stops being guessing

Right: for me that's when "prompt engineering"/"context engineering" start to earn the "engineering" suffix: when people start being methodical and applying techniques like evals.

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/397/ About if it's science or not, the difference is testing it through experiment.

It’s validated and filtered but isn’t it still guessing at the core? Should we call it validated guessing?

I think a validated guess is exactly what a prediction is.

[delayed]

You've heard of science versus pseudo-science? Well..

Engineering: "Will the bridge hold? Yes, here's the analysis, backed by solid science."

Pseudo-engineering: "Will the bridge hold? Probably. I'm not really sure; although I have validated the output of my Rube Goldberg machine, which is supposedly an expert in bridges, and it indicates the bridge will be fine. So we'll go with that."

"prompt engineer" or "context engineer" to me sounds a lot closer to "paranormal investigator" than anything else. Even "software engineer" seems like proper engineering in comparison.

Engineering: "Will the bridge hold? Yes, with a confidence of 99.95%"

Funny how you use a scientific term to discredit applied statistics. I've built useful non-deterministic systems many times and they had nothing to do with AI. Also, particle physics would like to have a word with you.

Guessing, how a non-deterministic system would behave.

Statistics isn't guessing. But it is guessing when the confidence interval is unknowable and constantly shifting. We're not talking relativity, we're talking about throwing pancakes at a wall to tell if there's a person behind it.