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Ask HN: Is prompt engineering just snake oil?

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Re: Ask HN: Is prompt engineering just snake oil?

#141

Post by SkyPuncher »

mdp2021 wrote: post #60
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100%. People who have not tried to interact with these models don't understand there is actually quite a lot of skill in navigating the latent space.

It really should be just an intermediate phase. Proper, solid control system must be created. First you have Stable Diffusion, then you create ControlNet - and this as just a beginning. This is also one of the reasons why the problem of transparency ("but why and how does it work?") is so important in Machine Learning: allowing control.

Somethings will be easier, but it's still a lot like programming. You often need to do a lot of setup to accomplish a task. For somethings, there's just no way around creating a specific context.

In many ways, it's the difference between using a library like lodash and writing the methods yourself. You still need to understand what's being done, a library just handles more things automatically for you.

Re: Ask HN: Is prompt engineering just snake oil?

#142

Post by layer8 »

The “engineering” in “prompt engineering“ is more like in “social engineering”. It’s a secondary, metaphorical meaning.

For example, Google defines the second meaning of "engineering" as:

2. the action of working _artfully_ to bring something about. "if not for his shrewd engineering, the election would have been lost"

(https://www.google.com/search?q=define%3AEngineering)

Merriam-Webster has:

3 : calculated manipulation or direction (as of behavior), giving the example of “social engineering”

(https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/engineering)

Random House has:

3. skillful or artful contrivance; maneuvering

(https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/enginee...)

Webster's has:

The act of maneuvering or managing.

(https://www.yourdictionary.com/engineering)

This is a well-established, nontechnical meaning of “engineering”.

Re: Ask HN: Is prompt engineering just snake oil?

#143

Post by jcfrei »

voidhorse wrote: post #20
cjbprime wrote: post #11

It'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_...

Yeah, pretty much this. Only a subset of the actual activity that falls under the umbrella of "software engineering" could be called engineering in the traditional sense. The engineers working on aviation software and other low-level, real-time, performance critical systems probably need to use quite a bit of maths and are closest to doing what we traditionally consider engineering. All those teams working on web app…

Thanks for reminding us that there are only a few real engineering professions. Reminds me of the Hemingway quote that there only three real sports: Motorracing, mountaineering and bull fighting - the rest are just games.

No seriously that kind of gate keeping is just ridiculous.

Re: Ask HN: Is prompt engineering just snake oil?

#144

Post by nuancebydefault »

ozim wrote: post #66
cjbprime wrote: post #11

It'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_...

Isn't real? You write about people who sling PHP or Javascript spaghetti? I have engineering degree in computer science (I think it is mostly thing in eastern Europe, you have bunch of electronics, math, computer architecture to learn), I worked on automotive software which is I have to say fairly regulated. Where you have to care for things like ISO or MISRA standards in your code. I don't mind people calling themse…

Within a lot of projects, before starting to code, quite some engineering needs to be done. Engineering is making first models that mock reality, trying them, refining them, making them more performant and so on. To me the title 'software engineer' summerize these skills nicely.

Re: Ask HN: Is prompt engineering just snake oil?

#145

Post by codeptualize »

There are some degradations, just like other "engineering" like software engineering. I am pretty sure most people don't know the ins and outs of everything that makes code run, from compiler to CPU, especially not the CPU's of today, I doubt any one person fully understands them. You just know the abstraction layer you manipulate and learn techniques how you can make it do the things you it want. That is quite similar to prompt writing.

You can certainly get better at it by learning the basics of LLM models, as well as finding and applying certain methods that improve the results.

You can actually see quite a lot of difference between someone trying out some things, or someone who has spent quite a bit of time trying to make it do non standard things.

What you call "engineering" is of course up for debate, but it's not snake oil.

Re: Ask HN: Is prompt engineering just snake oil?

#146

Post by [deleted] »

arroz wrote: post #76
ravenstine wrote: post #43

Software 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 build…

What’s your beef with computer science?

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Is prompt engineering just snake oil?

#147

Post by 908B64B197 »

mablopoule wrote: post #77
cjbprime wrote: post #11

It'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_...

You can absolutely be a "software engineer" in the legal sense, just not in the US. Here in France, the engineer diploma is a regulated thing, and there absolutely are software-centered engineering school who are accredited to deliver it, which is how I got mine. It's in the "Grandes écoles" cursus, which usually follows a more classical STEM-centric cursus called "classes prépa". As to whether "Software engineering"…

> As to whether "Software engineering" is a real thing, well in one hand most of it isn't very process-oriented,

Part of the reason for that is the cost of iteration is much lower. So software engineers can afford having less rigorous process. And the tooling is getting better, with formal specification languages, type systems and static analyzer.

Rapid prototyping, microcontrollers and simulation tools brought some of the same possibilities in mechanical & electrical engineering. Even the traditionally very conservative space industry is embracing faster iteration cycles (at least, SpaceX is).

"Software on a microcontroller isn't engineering, it's just coding, but replace said software by TTL chips and PROMs and suddenly it's EE".

Re: Ask HN: Is prompt engineering just snake oil?

#148

Post by 908B64B197 »

cjbprime wrote: post #117
agentultra wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it is. It’s a protected term in Canada and they have software engineers.

Are you saying that software engineers in Canada are P. Eng licensed? (If not, then your example is one where software engineers are misusing the protected term, but as they usually do not set up shop and mislead the general public into thinking they are certified, which would be the activity the protection is designed to thwart, the protection is rarely enforced.)

> Are you saying that software engineers in Canada are P. Eng licensed?

That's my understanding. They don't have a PE exam like here in the US. To be P. Eng licensed, they have to graduate from an accredited engineering program and register with some board. And they do have Software Engineering programs (I know; I hired folks from these).

Re: Ask HN: Is prompt engineering just snake oil?

#149

Post by VirusNewbie »

voidhorse wrote: post #20
cjbprime wrote: post #11

It'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_...

Yeah, pretty much this. Only a subset of the actual activity that falls under the umbrella of "software engineering" could be called engineering in the traditional sense. The engineers working on aviation software and other low-level, real-time, performance critical systems probably need to use quite a bit of maths and are closest to doing what we traditionally consider engineering. All those teams working on web app…

Lol yes, the people writing spaghetti code at boeing are real engineers and the people writing complex distributed systems at Google aren’t.

Re: Ask HN: Is prompt engineering just snake oil?

#150

Post by bank6062 »

iamwil wrote: post #9

Think 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…

Prompt engineering has been fascinating to follow at my job. People believe that they will be using "prompt engineering" as a new way to verbally interact with peers. As if they now have found the Rosetta stone for their own quirks.
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