The Constraint Architect

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In the early 2000s, two weeks after I joined Nienschanz, we got a new head of the systems integration department, Kolya Tamodin. On his very first day he called me in for a formal introduction and asked me what I wanted to become. I thought about it and said: an architect. Why that word in particular I still do not know. I was twenty-something, I was building Linux from source and had only the haziest notion of what architecture was, but the word flew out and then pursued me for a long time, changing its meaning each time. In the last couple of years it has acquired one more, and, I think, the most accurate of all.

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In the spring of 2023 Anthropic posted a job listing titled “Prompt Engineer and Librarian,” with a salary of up to three hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars a year. The news went round every technology publication, and for six months it seemed that humanity had found a new golden profession: people who knew how to talk to a model properly would be paid like surgeons. Courses on writing prompts multiplied faster than they could be advertised, and a new line appeared on résumés.

Two years later Fast Company was writing that the profession was dying out. In a 2025 Microsoft survey, prompt engineer came second to last among the new roles companies were planning to introduce, and job openings with that title had become many times fewer than at the peak. The models themselves had learned to understand ordinary speech well enough that magic formulas like “you are an expert with twenty years of experience” stopped making any difference, and the ability to set a task clearly became simply an expected skill, like the ability to write a letter.