Prompt Engineering is Dead. Long Live DSPy: How to Program LLMs Instead of Prompting Them

For the past few years, building AI-powered applications has felt less like software engineering and like digital alchemy. We’ve all been there: sitting in front of a playground or a code editor, meticulously tweaking a system prompt, adding "please think step-by-step," or begging the model to "take a deep breath" and format its output as valid JSON. We called this "prompt engineering." But let’s be honest with ourselves: it isn't engineering. It’s an artisan craft. It’s the equivalent of a master clockmaker hand-filing gears.