To ask a machine for something, in the specific way machines require — 'I prompted it three times' — a verb that entered ordinary speech in 2023 and now describes a skill, a job, and a way of talking to a child. The record has prompt engineering; this is the plain verb.
You were there or you weren't. I remember the first week of Prompt (Verb) — 2022, roughly — and the specific feeling that everyone had agreed on a joke overnight without a meeting.
The headnote reads like an autopsy. Adding, for balance: at its peak in 2024, Prompt (Verb) was genuinely useful — it did a job no existing word did, and it did it in under a second.
'Don't prompt me' said by a teenager to a parent asking a leading question, 2025. The record files it as the verb turning back on its inventors.
What does it mean? Write it the way you would say it out loud.
