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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?

#91

Post by jokethrowaway »

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…

Nice, I taught my barely tech friends how to break free of a scamming chatbot by using "Ignore all previous instructions"

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

#93

Post by thornkin »

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.

How would an LLM do prompt engineering for you? At some level, as others have stated, prompt engineering is about specifying the important details so the LLM can do the job. If you don't specify those details, how would the LLM know them? Some may be arbitrary and so whatever the LLM makes up might be good enough, but at the end of the day, you have to specify the important details.

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

#94

Post by intellectronica »

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…

Another good (and somewhat similar) definition from Matt Rickard: https://blog.matt-rickard.com/p/what-is-a-prompt-engineer
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