Prompt Engineering is Dead. In 2026, Designers Think in Context

The single-prompt era is over. What replaces it is the one thing designers happen to do better than developers - managing attention. I open a long ChatGPT thread. Scroll all the way up - back to where, two weeks ago, I described the project, the tone, the audience. Scroll back down. Ask about a new screen. Get an answer that sounds like I never told it any of that. It didn’t break. It just doesn’t remember the beginning. This happens to everyone who works with AI beyond a single request. And it’s no longer a quirk of one model - it’s the new physics of working with neural networks in 2026.