41–50 of 166 posts
Should we really call it "engineering" if its a case of "try random things until one of them works without really knowing why"?
"Prompt engineering is kind of like alchemy. There's no clear way to predict what will work best. It's all about experimenting until you find the right prompt." lololoollool
Many fields of study have this fuzzy property - it's easier to name which fields don't.
Isn’t engineering an exact science while prompt engineering is completely not? Although, even software engineering being an exact science, it is a funny one: most of us don’t get certified as like, let’s say, mechanical engineers do. Would they say we are engineers? So perhaps the “engineer” term got overloaded in recent years?
Software engineer has always been a daft, grandiose term that seems aimed at prestige rather than reality in the majority of cases. If coders can call themselves engineers, no reason why anybody else solving puzzles for a living can't.
One day I think there will be true software engineering. When that happens you won't be able to start software projects without certifications, and most people (or programs!) who actually do the coding will be following careful plans and instructions from the engineers who designed the project.
I for one am very happy software isn't fully professionalized yet!
Isn’t engineering an exact science while prompt engineering is completely not? Although, even software engineering being an exact science, it is a funny one: most of us don’t get certified as like, let’s say, mechanical engineers do. Would they say we are engineers? So perhaps the “engineer” term got overloaded in recent years?
Software engineer has always been a daft, grandiose term that seems aimed at prestige rather than reality in the majority of cases. If coders can call themselves engineers, no reason why anybody else solving puzzles for a living can't.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Software engineer has always been a daft, grandiose term that seems aimed at prestige rather than reality in the majority of cases. If coders can call themselves engineers, no reason why anybody else solving puzzles for a living can't.
In my opinion, coding is a craft. As software has only existed for like 70 years, we are more like the guilds building cathedrals in the middle ages than like modern civil engineering. One day I think there will be true software engineering. When that happens you won't be able to start software projects without certifications, and most people (or programs!) who actually do the coding will be following careful plans a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems like a `ranking_system_prompt` is used to rank the output of other prompts, which is pretty cool! > Your job is to rank the quality of two outputs generated by different prompts. The prompts are used to generate a response for a given task. You will be provided with the task description, the test prompt, and two generations - one for each system prompt. Rank the generations in order of quality. If Generation…
I'm pretty surprised more people dont use logit biases to call openai with. Checking if something is either a or b means that the tokens for those letters must be 100 weight which means they will be chosen no matter what and no other character is allowed.
Unless your prompt seriously conflicts with the schema, it's pretty consistent.
I think one should just use GPT to generate the prompts so as to reduce the human input further still, a kind of gpt-gpt-prompt-engineer-engineer.
Isn’t engineering an exact science while prompt engineering is completely not? Although, even software engineering being an exact science, it is a funny one: most of us don’t get certified as like, let’s say, mechanical engineers do. Would they say we are engineers? So perhaps the “engineer” term got overloaded in recent years?
Whilst BASIC/JavaScript/etc are all magic incantations to a child, a child will soon figure out there's underlaying logic, and learn the ability to reason about what code does, and what certain changes will do.
With prompts, it's all faerie logic. There is nothing to learn, there are only magic incantations that change drastically if the model is updated.
Worse yet, the incantations cannot be composed. E.g. take the SQL statement "SELECT column FROM table WHERE column = [%s]". For any given string you insert here, the output is predictable. You can even know which characters would trigger an injection attack.
With prompts you cannot predict results. Any word, phrase, or sequence of characters may upset the faeries and cause the model to misbehave in who knows what way. No processing of user-input will stop injection attacks.
Whilst it's dubious to call current software development practices "engineering", it's utterly ridiculous to do so for prompt-writing.
I think one should just use GPT to generate the prompts so as to reduce the human input further still, a kind of gpt-gpt-prompt-engineer-engineer.
Recently I’ve been trying to engineer a prompt that I intend to run 1k times.
Noticing GPT4 bug out on several responses, I’ve talked it through the problem more and asked it to rewrite the prompt. So an automated approach to help build better prompts based upon held out gold data is useful to me.