Do tech professionals need to master prompt engineering?

That’s been a critical question over the past few years, especially as more tech workflows have incorporated AI-powered chatbots like ChatGPT and Google Gemini. And the latest O’Reilly 2025 Tech Trends Report (sign-in required) has a potentially surprising answer: although tech pros are more interested than ever in AI skills such as natural language processing and machine learning, searches on O’Reilly’s online learning platform for “prompt engineering” declined slightly in 2024 after a sharp rise in 2023, indicating that tech professionals are no longer rushing to learn its intricacies.

What’s behind this dip? The report has some ideas:

“There have been a number of arguments that the need for prompt engineering is temporary. As generative AI improves, this line of reasoning contends, we will no longer need to write complex prompts that specify exactly what we want the AI to do and how to do it. Prompts will be less sensitive to exactly how they’re worded; changing a word or two will no longer give a completely different result. We’ll no longer have to say “explain it to me as if I were five years old” or provide several examples of how to solve a problem step-by-step.”

The report suggests the superior problem-solving in newer chatbots such as OpenAI’s GPT 4o1 has lessened the need for software engineers and other tech professionals to craft complicated, multi-part prompts: “At its best, it eliminates the need to write prompts that demonstrate how to solve the problem (a technique called few-shot prompting). At worst, it “decides” on an inappropriate process, and it’s difficult to convince it to solve the problem a different way.”

Meanwhile,  skills associated with AI  such as deep learning, generative models, and AI libraries all saw significant gains on O’Reilly’s platform—so the leveling-off of interest in prompt engineering isn’t part of a broader decline in AI.

Even if prompt engineering becomes simpler in the years ahead, knowing how to use a chatbot will remain a critical skill for many in tech. Whether you’re a coder or a manager, responsible use of chatbots can speed up your workflow and make you more efficient, freeing up time for you to focus on other tasks.