SEO, Software Engineer, Systems Administrator w/a budget, regex geniuses, obfuscated C challenge, demoscene, etc. - none of it snake oil.
$$ and demand don't change the skills?
I mean, Anakin _WAS_ good with machines.
Ask HN: Is prompt engineering just snake oil?
41–50 of 206 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is prompt engineering just snake oil?
#42I know someone who studied ML as black boxes kind of as her PhD (I don't really know the specifics so don't ask me) but I did find it interesting that if we're dealing with a sufficiently opaque and complex black box, we have to resort to our old friends experimentation and empiricism. So maybe it's not engineering but science? :p
A little tongue in cheek but it did get the noodle working
Re: Ask HN: Is prompt engineering just snake oil?
#43Software engineering is also snake-oil.
Yes, software can be engineered, but that's not what the vast majority of so-called software engineers are actually doing at their jobs. The title mostly exists to inflate the importance of a programmer with years of experience under their belt. In reality, most of them couldn't explain to you what engineering itself is, and their job primarily consists of duct-taping and building features expediently. It's like taking a carpenter whose job is to crank out barely adequate sheds for a shed company and calling them an architect.
Don't even get me started on "computer science."
Prompt engineering is a legitimate area of study, and is obviously a practice demanded by LLMs, but you gotta just ignore the "engineering" part. It's the same skill as being a good communicator. Take a room full of "software engineers", tell them "build me an app that will let me sell gadgets", and they'll do their best to build one, but chances are it won't do what you want unless you communicate with greater specificity. It's hilarious how many people think LLMs suck just because they don't do the right thing given a single shitty sentence.
Re: Ask HN: Is prompt engineering just snake oil?
#44It's okay; software engineering isn't real either. (In many countries, the word "engineer" is regulated -- you can't call yourself an engineer without professional qualifications and oversight.) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_and_licensure_in_...
I personally do not think Software engineering is a thing. There are opinions on how to structure Software even within same language and framework and there's little objective procedure to rate one way better that the other and there's one, that kind of performance gains usually are negligible. But prompt engineering? Based on what knowledge exactly?
Software engineering is definitely a thing. There are numerous ways to code robustly and to prove the software will do what it's supposed to. They're much used in mission-critical applications where failure is a Very Bad Thing.
But most developers do none of these things, and many developers don't even know they exist.
But prompt engineering is just search++. You might save some time if you know a little about the underlying technology, and there's an element of creativity which is unusual for search.
But it's still not rocket surgery.
Re: Ask HN: Is prompt engineering just snake oil?
#45Think of it more as "prompt-fu", akin to "google-fu"--or how to google. You do have to know how to talk to an LLM, and it will be important. But it's not so much engineering, as we come to think of it in software traditionally. I wouldn't get hung up on the name, but just see it for what it is--a bad name for something we'll need to learn to be effective. It won't go away entirely, but will be mitigated to be less im…
LLMs are very quirky. They need the correct context to produce something good and it’s often surprising what that needed context is. OP just play around with midjourney and you’ll soon realize that it is a very real thing
Re: Ask HN: Is prompt engineering just snake oil?
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Engineering is a practice. Like medicine, but we’re building machines that run in a virtual space. We architect and build houses in our minds. We send those projects to production to make the business money. That’s engineering.
Eh yes and no. "Traditional" engineering professions, ones where you need to get licensed, are all grounded in physics. Software engineering isn't (ignore the fact that bits running on silicon is physics, it's irrelevant). Software engineering is based on best practices and algorithms that are based on...some guy writing them, saying they're good, and others trusting that they're good. There's a million different way…
Engineering = Applied Physics.
Software Engineering = Applied Math.
Both are about modelling, so you have a good idea if a solution works before you build it.
If you're gluing stuff together and hoping it's not going to fall apart too often you're not doing either.
Re: Ask HN: Is prompt engineering just snake oil?
#47It’s not a durable skill. A year after learning to give perfect prompts for your favourite ai, the mode will get updated and you’ll have to learn it all again
Re: Ask HN: Is prompt engineering just snake oil?
#48It's okay; software engineering isn't real either. (In many countries, the word "engineer" is regulated -- you can't call yourself an engineer without professional qualifications and oversight.) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_and_licensure_in_...
I personally do not think Software engineering is a thing. There are opinions on how to structure Software even within same language and framework and there's little objective procedure to rate one way better that the other and there's one, that kind of performance gains usually are negligible. But prompt engineering? Based on what knowledge exactly?
In Canada, it’s a licensed profession
Re: Ask HN: Is prompt engineering just snake oil?
#49Unity has “customer support engineers” iirc. The USA misuses the term endlessly
Re: Ask HN: Is prompt engineering just snake oil?
#50I like this framing by Michael Hashimoto, on Prompt Engineering: https://mitchellh.com/writing/prompt-engineering-vs-blind-pr... Most of what we see on Twitter or YouTube is Blind Prompting. However, it is possible to apply an engineering mindset to prompting and that is what we should call prompt engineering. Check out the article for a much more detailed framing. Dair AI also has some nice info and resources ( with…
Prompt testing, especially when for q/a pairs where there are multiple right answers, has been bugging me a lot The article is reasonable, but also shows a big gap in tooling, as the techniques there feel closer to linting & typing then testing once you do more interesting prompts. They don't check the interesting parts..
> The article seems reasonable but ... closer to linting then testing... they don't check the interesting parts
can you elaborate a bit more on what those interesting parts are?
It could just be a limitation of computation.