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Re:Anthropic's Prompt Engineering Tutorial by simonw on Sunday October 12, 2025 @11:16AM (#45558789)
I've seen some good arguments recently that software engineering is weird in that computers ARE completely predictable - which isn't the case for other engineering fields, where there are far more unpredictable forces at play and the goal is to engineer in tolerances to account for that.

So maybe "prompt engineering" is closer to real engineering than "software engineering" is!

Re:Anthropic's Prompt Engineering Tutorial by enumjorge on Sunday October 12, 2025 @11:54AM (#45559130)
With distributed systems I'd say network unreliability introduces a good amount of unpredictability. Whether that's comparable to what traditional engineering disciplines see, I couldn't say. Some types of embedded programming, especially those deployed out in the field, might also need to account for non-favorable conditions. But the predictability argument is interesting nonetheless.
Re:Anthropic's Prompt Engineering Tutorial by nothrabannosir on Sunday October 12, 2025 @11:21AM (#45558821)
The computer may be reliable but the data passing through it isn’t.