Prompt engineering is just the "good at google searching" of tomorrow. That said, I think there is a lot more potential depth to it, seeing how inexpressive web searches are by comparison.
Ask HN: I learned useless skill of prompt engineering, how relevant will it be?
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Re: Ask HN: I learned useless skill of prompt engineering, how relevant will it be?
#22Prompt engineering is just the "good at google searching" of tomorrow. That said, I think there is a lot more potential depth to it, seeing how inexpressive web searches are by comparison.
Personally I think it will be fairly easy to convince an LLM to do prompt engineering not far from now. They just lack training data, because they are based on information from the web, but "how to prompt engineer" pages are spreading across the web and the next irritation of ChatGPT will probably pick all of that info up.
Re: Ask HN: I learned useless skill of prompt engineering, how relevant will it be?
#23I think one can do an analogy with search engines. 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 (wh…
The only point where I disagree is "the search engines have gotten a lot better over the last say 5-10 years". My impression is rather the opposite.
Re: Ask HN: I learned useless skill of prompt engineering, how relevant will it be?
#24I may have a gig for you if you are interested. Feel free to send me a message.
Email is the @gmail.com
Re: Ask HN: I learned useless skill of prompt engineering, how relevant will it be?
#25I must admit that I have a slight FOMO over prompt engineering. I'm pretty decent at verbalizing ideas and concepts for external consumption, and my experience with ChatGPT 4 has been excellent so far, but I still feel that I'm missing something.
Could you summarize the essence of the prpompting skill in a couple of sentences? Are there concepts that are critical to learn and master (e.g. 'chain of thought', etc.)?
Re: Ask HN: I learned useless skill of prompt engineering, how relevant will it be?
#26What is there to it other than knowing how to write and ask questions? I also get the desired results out of LLM models but I would hardly call it a skill (well, maybe on par with knowing how to "Google" stuff). Are there people who actually struggle with this?
It’s not a dichotomy between desired and undesired results - I am confident there exist more effective versions of every prompt I’ve ever sent, and I’d be surprised if that didn’t apply to everyone
Re: Ask HN: I learned useless skill of prompt engineering, how relevant will it be?
#27What is there to it other than knowing how to write and ask questions? I also get the desired results out of LLM models but I would hardly call it a skill (well, maybe on par with knowing how to "Google" stuff). Are there people who actually struggle with this?
When you want very specific output you need a lot of boilerplate with rules, worded in a way where it can't be misinterpreted by the model. I need to do a lot of trial and error before I get the desired output consistently and I presume that a good prompt engineer would get there faster.
Re: Ask HN: I learned useless skill of prompt engineering, how relevant will it be?
#28I think one can do an analogy with search engines. 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 (wh…
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Re: Ask HN: I learned useless skill of prompt engineering, how relevant will it be?
#29LLMs are non-deterministic. There is a certain randomness at play. So no, that 'skill' (however you even measure that) is useless, as any person with a bit of luck, could get better output.
Re: Ask HN: I learned useless skill of prompt engineering, how relevant will it be?
#30Lot's of cynical answers. 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.
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