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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?

#181

Post by nodemaker »

pixl97 wrote: post #114
nodemaker wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Changing a bunch of bits on a magnetic drive or another media is not like building an airplane that flies or a car that runs! Software engineering is closer to a priest that supposedly can communicate to god than it is to someone that builds a car! I have a CS degree too and people without it are sometimes much better than me at slinging code Actually forget people, you should realize how far this is from engineering…

>on a magnetic drive or another media is not like building an airplane that flies or a car that runs I ain't sure what century you live in, but it's not the current one... If I program some bits on my hard drive and now a stepper motor punches thought the side of the mount its bolted too. Or if I say "set the flaps to this pitch in this condition" and that doesn't happen, then something very real, and very bad, happe…

Yeah honestly maybe I am feeling a bit jaded by a career in software development with jira and other bs. It doesnt feel like engineering to me :)

If youre doing anything that physically moves something like a stepper motor i have a lot of respect for that.

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

#182

Post by wlonkly »

Veen wrote: post #39
psychlops wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think a country charging fees to bless a word makes a profession more or less real.

You should rethink that whenever you drive under a bridge or get on a boat. The reason they collapse or sink so infrequently is largely because engineers are accredited and held responsible.

It's true that lives hang in the balance in those forms of engineering, but there are a lot of forms of engineering that are low-stakes, like mechanical engineering of HVAC systems in an office, or audio engineering of a musical recording, where the stakes are not far off from that of writing software, or materials engineering of new stretch fabrics.

Whenever this question of engineering comes up it's always bridges, airplanes, and so on, but that's such a tiny percentage of engineering. Things don't have to be high-stakes to be engineering.

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

#183

Post by wlonkly »

JasserInicide wrote: post #34
awill88 wrote: post #28

Earlier 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…

I suppose technically the timing of traffic lights or deciding whether to use a roundabout involves physics in that if you get it wrong, cars bounce off each other, but I'm not sure civil engineering is any more grounded in physics than software engineering is.

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

#184

Post by [deleted] »

cyanydeez wrote: post #175
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…

Google Fi no long works. It's closer to prompt engineering.

[deleted]

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

#185

Post by zamnos »

silisili wrote: post #138
enraged_camel wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I refer to myself as a software developer, but also intensely dislike the gatekeeping around the term “engineer”.

I call myself a programmer. Nothing more, nothing less. While I don't necessarily go out of my way to gatekeep, I find 'engineer' pretty cringy, and 'architect' makes my eyes roll out of my head. What's next, Software Physician?

They do give PhDs in Computers Science. And they require a similar amount of time (10-years-ish) to get as an MD, plus the salaries are similarly generous.

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

#186

Post by idontreadtheop »

jcfrei wrote: post #143
voidhorse wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s also a totally borked analogy. In software the spec is usually the carpentry equivalent of “build a house. Must have door”.

Building a house takes engineering (e.g. structural). It also takes carpenters and plumbers and so on. What’s fun about software is you get to do all of it on one project.

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

#187

Post by zamnos »

jcfrei wrote: post #143
voidhorse wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is it? Are you legally culpable in the case that your software kills or maims somebody? Because a civil engineer is, if the bridge they built falls down. Is there a license you need to practice writing software, that can be revoked and prevent you from writing more software if you're caught writing software with gross negligence, leading to it getting hacked? Because other engineering disciplines are held to those kinds of standards.

Words mean things, and if we want to consider "software engineer" as anything more than title inflation, it should mean more than just a programmer who's full of themselves.

If I shit out a webapp that's crashes if you look at it funny, that shouldn't be considered software engineering because it's a pile of shit that barely works.

If I make a webapp that actually gives useful error messages to users and is robust in the face of failure and is maintainable and someone else would want to touch my code, then we're starting to get somewhere.

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

#188

Post by gremlinsinc »

I'm building a startup in this space between prompting and crafting agents, but for me using lang chain to create vector embeddings to enhance an LLMs memory and context is a core skill a prompt engineer should have.

I've already considered myself a prompt engineer instead of a software engineer, because I've been coding 15 years and now 80 percent of the code is generated for me, so I really don't think I'm ever going to want to go back to engineering without the aid of ai.

If you're a software engineer and you use chatGPT to help you code, you've switched careers from software to prompting.

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

#189

Post by voidhorse »

jcfrei wrote: post #143
voidhorse wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A society that elects to apply an existing term to cases in which it doesn't quite fit indicates the society is linguistically bankrupt. I'd argue that, instead of calling every profession "engineering" we ought to come up with more precise distinctions and designations.

Let's be honest, the main reason so many people glom on to the term "engineer" is because (as others have mentioned) the rigorous processes around licensing for other engineering disciplines keeps supply low, which attaches an inherent market value to the term. People then adopt the term without justification in the hope if nets them a pay raise. We ought to accept that it's OK not to be an engineer. Other professions are also valuable. It's also important to "gatekeep" meanings of words to a certain extent lest we think it wise to accept a language in which any word can mean anything.

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

#190

Post by eagleshou »

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…

when software first came out, us electrical engineers don't think this is "engineering" either, basically it is all people creating a imaginary machinary for other people operating in their imaging world.
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