Re:Ask HN: Is prompt engineering just snake oil?
by dragonwriter on Sunday April 23, 2023 @02:52PM
(#35679327)
> That this is not intrinsic, but just a current stage, is only part of the story: the user will want to have a tool that allows the production of what the artist had exactly in mind
Communicating to another entity (even a human) “exactly what you had in mind” (or, more to the point, so as to get them to behave so as to produce “exactly what you had in mind”) is a skill which involves understanding of the audience, understanding of the mode of communication, and understanding of the field about which you are communicating. “Prompt engineering” is just a fancy name for the particular application of that set of skills in the domain of getting desired results out of an LLM. Whether or not the terminology ends up being durable, the skill isn’t going away, as long as we are using language to communicate with models.
(Once we get the ability to just plug our brain into an AI, will their be a skill of focussing properly so that the mind-reading tech reads the right thoughts? Probably, and that will be the new “prompt engineering”.)
Communicating to another entity (even a human) “exactly what you had in mind” (or, more to the point, so as to get them to behave so as to produce “exactly what you had in mind”) is a skill which involves understanding of the audience, understanding of the mode of communication, and understanding of the field about which you are communicating. “Prompt engineering” is just a fancy name for the particular application of that set of skills in the domain of getting desired results out of an LLM. Whether or not the terminology ends up being durable, the skill isn’t going away, as long as we are using language to communicate with models.
(Once we get the ability to just plug our brain into an AI, will their be a skill of focussing properly so that the mind-reading tech reads the right thoughts? Probably, and that will be the new “prompt engineering”.)