Addy Osmani (@addyosmani)

Thanks Christian! :) That's a good analogy! You've captured something really important about why this feels like a genuine discipline emerging rather than just rebranded prompt writing. Industrial engineering didn't just happen because machines existed - it emerged when systems became complex enough that intuition and trial-and-error weren't sufficient anymore. You needed systematic measurement, process optimization, and rigorous methodology to get reliable outcomes from complex mechanical systems. We're hitting that same inflection point with AI systems. Early on, clever prompting was enough for demos and simple use cases. But now we're building production systems where an AI agent might retrieve from multiple knowledge bases, coordinate with several tools, maintain conversation state, and handle edge cases - all while staying within token budgets and cost constraints.