Code is Cheap, Context is Gold: Why Senior Engineers are the Ultimate Prompt Engineers
In the "before times"—roughly three years ago—the hallmark of a great engineer was their mastery of syntax, memory management, and algorithmic complexity. Today, LLMs can spit out a working React component or a Python FastAPI backend in seconds. This has led to a panicked narrative: Is the Senior Engineer obsolete? In reality, the opposite is true. We are entering an era where Domain Expertise is the highest form of leverage. While anyone can type a sentence into a chat box, only those who have spent years in the trenches know how to steer the machine toward a production-ready reality. Here is why seniority is the secret weapon of the AI era. 1. The "Unknown Unknowns" Problem A junior developer prompts for a solution; a senior engineer prompts for a system . When a junior asks an AI to "write a function to process payments," the AI will do exactly that. A senior engineer, scarred by years of production outages, knows that a payment function without idempo...