But that's the thing, prompt formulation is not engineering in the sense I'm talking about. We know why a plane flies, we know why an engine turns, we know how

But that's the thing, prompt formulation is not engineering in the sense I'm talking about. We know why a plane flies, we know why an engine turns, we know how a CPU works - mostly. We don't know how GenAI gets from the prompt to the result with any specificity at all. Almost all the informational entropy of the output is hidden from us.