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.
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.
If it's actually validated, according to rigorous principles, it's not a guess, but a system of predictions with a known confidence interval, that allows you to know if you can be sure of something.
Right now, you cannot get that far. And if you happen to... Tomorrow it will be different.
Predicting tides is possible. It requires enormous amounts of data and processing to be sure of it. Right now, we've got tides, but we don't have the data from the satellites. Because the owner is constantly shifting the prompt, for good reasons of their own. So we can't be confident - or we can only be so blindly.
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.
I'm not sure there's much scientific or mathematical about guessing how a non-deterministic system will behave.