Prompt engineering is dead — long live system design for LLMs

Prompt engineering is dead — long live system design for LLMs If you've worked with ai long enough, you've hit this wall. Here's the practical path through it. The Problem Structured outputs, function calling, eval frameworks. Most teams discover this too late — after an incident, not before. What Actually Works The solution isn't complex, but it requires being deliberate: Audit first — understand your current state before changing anything Automate the guardrails — manual checks don't survive team growth Measure before and after — so you can prove the improvement The Setup (quick version) # Example: basic health check for ai # Replace with your actual tooling echo "Check your ai configuration" For a production setup, you'll also want alerting, dashboards, and runbooks. When to Revisit Set a calendar reminder for 30 days out. Configuration drift is real — what works today breaks next quarter when your team scales. TL;DR Don't skip the audit step Automate enforcement, don't rely on conv