I spent 3 months perfecting prompts. Then I deleted half of them.
In late 2023 I had a directory called prompts/ with 47 carefully tuned templates. Few-shot examples, Chain-of-Thought scaffolds, a tiny ReAct loop I was very proud of. I'd A/B tested wording. I'd argued on Twitter about whether "Let's think step by step" still worked.
By mid-2025 I deleted 23 of them. They weren't wrong. They just weren't the bottleneck anymore.
The thing that broke my agents in production was never the prompt. It was the environment around the prompt — the tools they could call, the files they could see, the moment the loop should stop, the rollback when a tool returned garbage. The prompt was a polished doorknob on a house with no foundation.
That's the story of the last three years of AI engineering, compressed: we keep renaming the layer where the real problem lives.
