I also had a good friend who was an absolute wizard with early stablediffusion. he could make the model do things that were supposedly impossible at the time. His prompts were works of art. Now any of the commercial image models go far beyond what he could do. It's interesting to think about how there was this ephemeral art form of manipulating image models that existed for about a year.

The same could be said of prompt engineering. Gone are the days of telling the model that it is an expert software engineer with a PhD in the most relevant subtopic. These days the common wisdom is to just clearly articulate what you want it to do. Huge amounts of energy put into prompt engineering are now completely swept away by incremental model advances.