11–20 of 95 posts
Like every skill, it depends on what you do with it.
LLMs are controlled by language already, thus far i figured out that you best let the machine define the query and refine it.
My personal take is that AI is not at a point yet where it will take over jobs in tech, but we are already at a point where someone with LLM skills is more efficient that someone who is not.
I do think prompt engineering is a new industry, and your experience (if you actually good) will translate will into future jobs.
In my opinion it has to be combined with engineering to be competitive in a commercial sense.
Sure, you're aligning your approach to a machine, but it's not completely dissimilar.
I struggle with delegation in general, even taking the time to delegate to LLMs, mostly because I work faster intuitively and expressing myself clearly just takes longer. With the benefits of semi-repeatable results, personally, I've found the most benefit working with GPT3 & 4 over the last 6 months has been getting better and more conscious in describing what I'm after.
I noticed that a lot of people are terrible with search engines. They would carefully try to craft a combination of keywords that they hope will answer their problem.
I have pretty much always been able to find the answers I need quickly, by using a few ideas I see not that many around me use, such as trying to imagine in what context the answer might be answered (what would be the title of a blog or forum post about it, etc), as well as searching for the exact error message if I got one etc.
Now, search engines have gotten a lot better over the last say 5-10 years, so this skill isn't as important anymore, but I remember how the ability to find things quickly was a real productivity booster.
I think something similar might happen with LLMs.
You will have a (probably much bigger) productivity boost by being great at leveraging them.
With time, the user interfacing tooling and general knowledge of them will get much better, so the relative benefit you have will grow smaller, but it will for sure always be useful to know how to use them well.
My 5c.
Isn’t prompt engineering basically writing tests around a prompt and fiddling with it till you have as many passing tests as possible? It’s basically software engineering around a black box.
I think this is similar to the "skill" of "googling" that became important about 2 decades ago. You learn how to search effectively and it improved your programming skills. This was primitive prompt engineering. If LLMs and the chat style interfaces last, this will continue to be useful.
TL;DR: by the time your skill isn’t useful, the whole landscape of modern will be changing so much that it’s kinda a moot point. Like losing your job during an apocalypse