I once to believed this too. And then I got much more skilled at prompting agents to get the results I wanted.

As someone who is and always has been a very unapologetic skeptic, I am still surprised by the number of capable people who can't accept that things are changing.

It can't be either none of it matters, or all of it matters. The truth lies in the middle somewhere.

It's less prompt engineering, and more breaking down work into chunks an llm can do. With more powerful models you can do more autonomously, and with dumber ones, you have to step in and do work more often.

A very intentional line in my CLAUDE/AGENTS is to act as the Principle Engineer and to explain architectural decisions along the way. I'm not about blindly generating the outcome. I'm reviewing decisions, asking deep questions, performing research and basically taking a college-level course in a specific topic with every big project I deliver.

Prompt engineering is a skill insofar as technical communication is a skill. If you don't value this then I don't know what to tell you. It's not hard, but it's important.

Harness engineering is a skill insofar as it's not a trivial engineering problem. It's not super hard to get a simple one running, but an effective one can be quite in depth.