In mid-2023, the terms ‘prompt engineer’ and ‘prompt engineering’ reached an apex of popularity in web searches, but since that time, both terms have fallen in search requests from that height. Prompt engineer especially has fallen into disuse, and even become the target of satire from The Daily Show (April 1, 2024), which referred to a prompt engineer as ‘type’s question guy.’ The popularity of the two connected terms reflected the initial belief that the role of a prompt engineer would allow workers to survive and thrive during the revolution of AI, and was brought up in new and old media alike. At the height of its popularity, what exactly were the promises ascribed to becoming a ‘prompt engineer’? How was ‘prompt engineer’ discursively constructed, and what did this construction reveal specifically about the view of the job market, as well as asymmetrical power relations created by the emergence of generative AI (Please note that I refrain from defining or going into specifics of what AI is. Firstly, the creators of the prompt engineer discourse do not define it either, except as both a threat to workers and as a receptacle for their ambitions to find a place that values liberal arts skills and rewards them commeasurably. AI is thus a spectre useful in creating the reactive discourse of prompt engineer as the savior of liberal arts majors in the face of a major technological leap and attendant social disruption. However, I do make a useful distinction between AI, whose existence is debated, and Large Language Models (LLMs), a specialist terms which denotes the predictive machines popularly called AI)? To answer these questions, I unpack the semiotics of the term itself, then I compare the utopian way it was constructed in traditional media (Washington Post, Fortune, Forbes, and TIME), to its realist depiction in new media, specifically TikTok. Specifically, I examine such factors as the discursive Appeal to IT expert Authority, the narrative of prompt engineers as oracular ‘machine whisperers’, the existence of ‘no coding’ work in the tech industry for liberal arts majors, and the promise of a salary that both reimburses the costs of a liberal arts education and affirms its intrinsic value. Finally, I discuss what the transient popularity of the term tells us about social discourses geared towards young workers facing work displacement through the development of generative AI from three standpoints - economic Rational Choice Theory (Svetlova, Soc Econ Rev, 20(2), 841–861, https://doi.org/10.1093/ser/mwab033 , 2022), Marxist thought from the fragment on machines from the Grundisse (Marx, Grundrisse. Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/index.htm . 2015), and as what I term Techbro discourse, or unfounded promises of technocratic miracles (see Glossary) as profiled in popular media. I conclude by examining what the popularity of prompt engineer tells us about the predictive ability of young workers facing AI, and juxtapose this optimistic narrative with the reality of shrinking tech industry employment data for the same period.