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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?

#71

Post by intellectronica »

inconfident2021 wrote: post #66
intellectronica wrote: post #61

It depends on how you define, or what you include under, "prompt engineering". For some definitions it's not that valuable, but here's one definition that IMO is and will continue to be very valuable: 1. You have a lot of mileage with LLMs and AI systems in general (people who are exceptionally good at this have been reporting spending several hours daily working with AIs). 2. You already mastered a large number of u…

This is a good list of points! Knowingly or unknowingly I have been doing most of these things. 4-5 is currently unreachable for me. Others are quite manageable!

Both 4 and 5 are worth learning, and have never been easier to get into (hint: AI can help).

Re: Ask HN: I learned useless skill of prompt engineering, how relevant will it be?

#72

Post by cpursley »

sam0x17 wrote: post #21

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.

Even now so many people suck at the most basic Google searching. I consistently get easily Googlable questions from some family members - and I’m not talking about geriatric or illiterate ones. And I take my time to explain how they can just look it up (without being rude).

So I’m not sure if AI tools will help for these types of people without basic skills of logic and inquiry. And I don’t mean that in an insulting manner, I’m not even close to being the sharpest tool in the shed. But you really do have to have baseline IQ and knowledge to be able to make use of these tools.

Re: Ask HN: I learned useless skill of prompt engineering, how relevant will it be?

#73

Post by chriskanan »

My opinion, which is shared by many other AI researchers, is that sensitivity to the exact phrasing of the prompt is a deficiency in current approaches to LLMs and many are trying to fix that issue. If they succeed, then I think the need for prompt engineering will be mostly negated. Hard to know when that line of research will yield success, though.

Re: Ask HN: I learned useless skill of prompt engineering, how relevant will it be?

#75

Post by unforeseen9991 »

mattlondon wrote: post #44

Probably not very relevant IMHO. I don't think "the future" will include much direct prompting of LLMs. It will all be integrated into some other tool as a means to an end - what we have today with a raw prompt-and-answer mode are just proof of concept toys. I fully expect that LLMs will end up deeply integrated into other things, so obviously the code IDE use case, but also less obvious things like travel websites w…

And the prompting may be more domain / LLM specific. I currently use one that is more or less a analytics query engine and the prompts there are completely different compared to other use cases.

Re: Ask HN: I learned useless skill of prompt engineering, how relevant will it be?

#77

Post by runnerup »

cpursley wrote: post #72
sam0x17 wrote: post #21

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.

Even now so many people suck at the most basic Google searching. I consistently get easily Googlable questions from some family members - and I’m not talking about geriatric or illiterate ones. And I take my time to explain how they can just look it up (without being rude). So I’m not sure if AI tools will help for these types of people without basic skills of logic and inquiry. And I don’t mean that in an insulting…

Judging by most of the comments on Reddit (and about half the comments on select HN posts) … I think you’re right. Many adults lack the critical thinking and systems thinking necessary to use LLMs like ChatGPT effectively.

I’d like to think that the conversational style shortcuts their usual analytic skill, and maybe the next generation will more widely have a native understanding of the difference between LLM responses and human responses. But I think it’s more closely related to the phenomenon where many humans can’t currently choose whether total summations, year over year changes, or per capita representations are the most correct to use for a given situation.

There’s a lack of “validating input” in both online and IRL conversations which is a huge barrier to a person really analyzing information that they’re presented with. Many people are “below the median” in their ability to do this. But more importantly, I’m not sure which percentile cutoff currently is “good enough” at it.

Re: Ask HN: I learned useless skill of prompt engineering, how relevant will it be?

#78

Post by zulban »

Lots of people still aren't good at using Google, and they are not as effective professionally. Like any skill, there's a market based on how rare, difficult to learn, and useful it is.

Do you think your skill is rare, difficult to learn, and useful?

Re: Ask HN: I learned useless skill of prompt engineering, how relevant will it be?

#79

Post by hnfong »

roel_v wrote: post #57
olalonde wrote: post #19

What 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?

I've watched (non technical) people use ChatGPT a few times now, and most of them have rather underwhelming results. The reason is that they think it's just some other search engine, and they phrase their prompts as 'search queries'. Or they go completely the other direction and think they can just throw in a few random words that somewhat describe what they're roughly thinking of, and then expect the computer to fil…

Do you have examples of people failing to get a good response from chatgpt because of bad prompts? I’m asking because at least for simple cases I can often just give it a very terse request and usually it will attempt to guess what I mean and give a reasonable answer. If not I can fix it with a follow up question.

My intuition is that language models have read terabytes of random internet data, and while presumably most developers of LLMs try to find high quality data, the models generally do ingest quite a bit of random stuff, and they try to make sense of those too, so in terms of understanding they are probably better than the strictness in format that we programmers are used to.

Of course the token thing is probably significant, but my understanding is that it affects the result only when you misspell your words(?)

Re: Ask HN: I learned useless skill of prompt engineering, how relevant will it be?

#80

Post by bobwaycott »

I’m not sure how one measures being a good prompter, but taking a step back, you’ve exercised and honed the skill of using language with precision to communicate ideas, requirements, and expected outcomes effectively. You can explain your ideas in a way that primes outcomes to your expected goals. When you see the outcomes aren’t aligning, you can further refine with language to correct course and steer back toward your goal.

That is a great skill to have. It’s the kind of skill that saves entire teams of product, design, and engineering folks tons of time. It’s the kind of skill that helps communicate ideas, requirements, and expectations no matter what the problem space in ways that ensure everyone is aligned, understanding, and working together. The absence of this skill usually leads to confusion, wasted effort, frustration, dissatisfaction, and other negative outcomes.

Learning skills often has a compounding effect, as well. Even if a given skill isn’t forever usable in its original form, what you learn along the way continues to pay dividends.

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