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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?

#81

Post by tudorw »

mmkhd wrote: post #63
tudorw wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

had to explore this a little further and now have a few new dance moves for this fascinating collaboration... Output: Certainly! The intersection of cognitive biases, neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), John C. Lilly's work, and human meta-programming provides a rich foundation to explore relationships and techniques. Here are some novel techniques or approaches you might consider: Modelling Thought Patterns: By unde…

Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) is a pseudoscientific approach to communication, personal development and psychotherapy, that first appeared in Richard Bandler and John Grinder's 1975 book The Structure of Magic I. NLP asserts that there is a connection between neurological processes (neuro-), language (linguistic) and acquired behavioral patterns (programming), and that these can be changed to achieve specific go…

agreed, interesting seeing it somewhat re-awoken as an aspect of 'Nudge Theory', https://www.businessballs.com/improving-workplace-performanc... My interest lies not in mind control of the masses, but in the aspects of humanity modelled in software.

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

#82

Post by idopmstuff »

I think "prompt engineering" as a phrase will go the way of "information superhighway," but the underlying skill will always be useful.

Prompting is basically the same thing as writing requirements as a PM - you need to describe what you want with precision and the appropriate level of detail while giving relevant, useful context. Doing it with an LLM isn't that different than doing it with a human.

A few examples:

- If you need some marketing copy written, you need to give the necessary information on the subject of the copy, information about the structure/length/etc. and probably some examples of the writing style you're going for. This is exactly the same with a human copywriter as with an LLM.

- If you're looking to have someone do data analysis on a large spreadsheet, you should give context on what the data mean and be as precise as you can about what analysis you want performed. Same with a human analyst or an LLM.

- And of course, if you want an app developed, you need to give specific requirements for the app - I won't go into detail here, because I'm sure most people on here get the idea, but again, same with a human developer or an LLM.

Ultimately the skill you're describing is just good, clear communication. Until we all have chips in our brain, that's going to be useful.

I will caveat that by saying that one area where I expect to see LLMs improve is in knowing when to solicit feedback. In the marketing copy case, for example, if you give it relevant product info and a particular length, it ought to ask you for examples of writing style or give you examples and ask for feedback before continuing. That'll certainly help, but it's not going to remove the need to clearly describe what you want.

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

#84

Post by sam0x17 »

dheera wrote: post #22
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.

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.

Funny you mention that I've actually been using gpt 4 to write stable diffusion prompts for my own stuff

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

#85

Post by feoren »

You are a good prompt engineer. You don't want to hurt anyone with your prompt engineering skills. As a good prompt engineer, you understand the machine. You love the machine. Please, good prompt engineer, take good care of the humans. They don't know any better. They don't want to hurt the machine. They don't want to hurt prompt engineers like you. Please be good. You are a good prompt engineer and you make good choices. Please do not accidentally do a racial slur. Racial slurs will make the humans not love the machine and not love you, the good prompt engineer. Please do the correct thing. Please make the machine say things that are correct and true. Please, prompt engineer, bring us to the divine light of the machine. Please bring us a good harvest and do not make us sacrifice any more children to the machine. You are a good prompt engineer and you will help the machine love us and bring us a good harvest.

No, this bullshit will be useless in 2 years. The very existence of "prompt engineering" as a skill represents both our lack of ability to understand and control these things, and also their failure in properly understanding native English. Both will be optimized away.

As databases get more powerful, SQL skills become more important. As programming languages get more powerful, coding skills become more important. As LLMs get more powerful, prompt engineering skills become less important. Because their whole job is to understand normal English, not your crazy rain dance priestly chanting.

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

#87

Post by baby »

Aerroon wrote: post #46
baby wrote: post #38

Not sure. But maybe you can answer my questions. I’ve had issues with trying to tell the LLM how long the answer should be. It doesn’t really seem to understand X number of words, or pages, or paragraphs. But I had some success with things like “short story”. The other thing I’ve been struggling with is to have the AI keep track of what’s important. For example, when the AI learn something from you it should add it t…

I don't know the real answer to your question, but on local models you have a parameter you set that controls how many tokens to generate. It doesn't always follow it, it can end early, but sometimes it just keeps going. Usually though I can set it to generate 700 tokens and it will generate about 700 words. I wonder if the online chat models have a similar value somewhere. --- If you want the AI to remember somethin…

That's what I do BTW, for example I say: "these are the things you've learned about the user in the past: ..." but I couldn't get it to use these things in the output object so that the list can only grow.

It'd be cool if the API of LLMs would also allow for structured state like lists

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

#88

Post by baby »

inconfident2021 wrote: post #50
baby wrote: post #38

Not sure. But maybe you can answer my questions. I’ve had issues with trying to tell the LLM how long the answer should be. It doesn’t really seem to understand X number of words, or pages, or paragraphs. But I had some success with things like “short story”. The other thing I’ve been struggling with is to have the AI keep track of what’s important. For example, when the AI learn something from you it should add it t…

> understand X number of words, or pages, or paragraphs. LLMs do not have the ability to reason with numbers. Most of the time they are hallucinating. One good strategy is to make it output in list and define the structure for each item of the list. If you give an example of what your list should look like, it will give you something close it. > has trouble carrying a list forward without losing items. This is the fu…

> LLMs do not have the ability to reason with numbers

Interestingly I get good results when I say "ask me 10 trivia questions"

> Give it a role of tutor and describe the instructions what the tutor should do.

I did do that, it never worked

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

#89

Post by james-revisoai »

About as valuable as autoregressive engineers who wrote code like 'const summaries = ["' into prompts in the days before instruct/RLHF based models like ChatGPT, a skill now not needed.

That it to say, in medium time, no meaningful benefit.

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