Prompt engineering is collapsing – GPT-5 just proved it

GPT-5 is a beast. But here’s the thing nobody wants to say out loud: it just killed prompt engineering as a sustainable practice.

Carefully tuned prompts from GPT-4o? Broken.

Styles, logic, answer habits? All shifted.

Companies? Forced to roll back or re-test thousands of prompts overnight.

This isn’t progress. It’s technical debt disguised as innovation. Every new release means paying a Prompt Migration Tax: rewriting, regression-testing, and re-training teams.

Meanwhile:

Users are losing trust — sticking with old models or switching providers.

Security is a joke — OWASP already flagged prompt injection as the #1 LLM risk, and NIST said the same.

Vendors keep pushing “best practices” like longer separators or system prompts… band-aids on a structural wound.

The cycle looks like this: upgrade → break → patch → break again → patch again. How long before the entire industry realizes this is a dead end?

Prompt engineering isn’t the future. It’s a trap. And GPT-5 just made that painfully clear.