Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering

pub.towardsai.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 212 posts

Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering

#141

Post by amelius »

teucris wrote: post #23
amelius wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prompt is specification, not code.

Not to be too pedantic, but code is a kind of specification. I think making the blanket statement "Prompt is code" is inaccurate but there does exist a methodology of writing prompts as if they are specifications that can reliably converted to computational actions, and I believe we're heading toward that.

Yeah, I assumed someone would say this.

My manager gives me specifications, which I turn into code.

My manager is not coding.

This is how to look at it.

Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering

#143

Post by ang_cire »

zkmon wrote: post #84

But ... what else should they be doing? What's the expectation here? For example, in the 90's, a startup that offered a nice UI for a legacy console based system, would have been a great idea. What's wrong with that?

I think the point is more to point out the inherent danger presented when your platform is just a wrapper, but is being sold as more than that.

A lot of these startups have little to no moat, but they're raking in money like no one's business. That's exactly what happened in the dotcom bubble.

Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering

#144

Post by danny_codes »

zkmon wrote: post #84

But ... what else should they be doing? What's the expectation here? For example, in the 90's, a startup that offered a nice UI for a legacy console based system, would have been a great idea. What's wrong with that?

IMO nothing wrong with it. Just misleading to call yourself an AI company when you actually make a CRUD app. I think if these companies were honest about what they’re doing nobody would be upset. There’s an obvious deliberate attempt to give an impression of technical complexity/competence that isn’t there.

I assume it works because the ecosystem is, as you say, so new. Non-technical observers have trouble distinguishing between LLM companies and CRUD companies

Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering

#145

Post by laristine »

simonw wrote: post #140

Why is this post published in November 2025 talking about GPT-4? I'm suspicious of their methodology: > Open DevTools (F12), go to the Network tab, and interact with their AI feature. If you see: api.openai.com, api.anthropic.com, api.cohere.ai You’re looking at a wrapper. They might have middleware, but the AI isn’t theirs. But... everyone knows that you shouldn't make requests directly to those hosts from your web…

Providers such as OpenAI have client keys so your client application can call the providers directly. Many developers prefer them as they save roundtrip costs and latency.

https://platform.openai.com/docs/api-reference/realtime-sess...

Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering

#146

Post by ivape »

eddythompson80 wrote: post #101

For me, 2023 was an entire year of weekly demos that now looking back at were basically a "Look at this dank prompt I wrote" followed by thunderous applause from the audience (which was mostly, but not exclusively, upper management) Hell man, I attended a session at an AWS event last year that was entirely the presenter opening Claud and writing random prompts to help with AWS stuff... Like thanks dude... That was a…

Wait ...

You mean teams are already building their own solutions to existing solutions? Software development will live on in eternity then.

Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering

#147

Post by teiferer »

chmod775 wrote: post #106
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, TBH my BS detector is going off because this article never explains how he is able to intercept these calls. To be able to call the OpenAI directly from the front end, you'd need to include the OpenAI key, which would be a huge security hole. I don't doubt that many of these companies are just wrappers around the big LLM providers, but they'd be calling the APIs from their backend where nothing should be interc…

> Yeah, TBH my BS detector is going off because this article never explains how he is able to intercept these calls. You mean, except for explaining what he's doing 4-5 times? He was literally repeating himself restating it. Half the article is about the various indicators he used. THERE'S EXAMPLES OF THEM. There's this bit: > Monitored their network traffic for 60-second sessions > Decompiled and analyzed their Java…

> Monitored their network traffic for 60-second sessions

How can he monitor what's going on between a startup's backend and OpenAI's server?

> The truth is just an F12 away

That's just not how this works. You can see the network traffic between your browser and some service. In 12 cases that was OpenAI or similar. Fine. But that's not 73%. What about the rest? He literally has a diagram claiming that the startups contact an LLM service behind the scenes. That's what's not described, how does he measure that?

You are not bothered by the only sign that the author even exist is this one article and the previous one? Together with the claim to be a startup founder? Anybody can claim that. It doesn't automatically provide credibility.

Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering

#148

Post by xenospn »

nottorp wrote: post #92
zkmon wrote: post #84

But ... what else should they be doing? What's the expectation here? For example, in the 90's, a startup that offered a nice UI for a legacy console based system, would have been a great idea. What's wrong with that?

Actual AI. Not being "AI" users. Being LLM users would be fine but they pretend they do AI.

What’s actual AI in this context?

Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering

#149

Post by DetroitThrow »

chmod775 wrote: post #106
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, TBH my BS detector is going off because this article never explains how he is able to intercept these calls. To be able to call the OpenAI directly from the front end, you'd need to include the OpenAI key, which would be a huge security hole. I don't doubt that many of these companies are just wrappers around the big LLM providers, but they'd be calling the APIs from their backend where nothing should be interc…

> Yeah, TBH my BS detector is going off because this article never explains how he is able to intercept these calls. You mean, except for explaining what he's doing 4-5 times? He was literally repeating himself restating it. Half the article is about the various indicators he used. THERE'S EXAMPLES OF THEM. There's this bit: > Monitored their network traffic for 60-second sessions > Decompiled and analyzed their Java…

>Response times matching OpenAI’s API latency patterns (150–400ms for most queries)

This also matches the latency of a large number of DB queries and non-OpenAI LLM inference requests.

>Token usage patterns identical to GPT-4’s pricing tiers

What? Yes this totally smells real.

He also mentions backoff patterns, which I'm not sure how he'd disambiguate extremely standard backoff in a normal API.

Given the ridiculousness of these claims, I believe there's a reason he didn't include the fingerprinting methodology in this article.

Re: 73% of AI startups are just prompt engineering

#150

Post by Esophagus4 »

Oras wrote: post #111

I can believe that many startups are doing prompt engineering and agents but in a sense this like saying 90% of startups are using cloud providers mainly AWS and Azure. There is absolutely no point of reinventing the wheel to create a generic LLM, spend fortune to run GPUs while there are providers giving this power cheaply

In addition, there may be value in getting to market quickly with existing LLM providers, proving out the concept, then building / training specialized models if needed once you have traction.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_startup

Post reply on HN