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Comment by gillesjacobs | Hacker News Reader

Prompt "engineering" is definitely going to be in some job descriptions soon.

This is a weird thought, but I think I stand a better chance of being able to learn to speak "bot" than I do of ever actually learning to write code, even though code is pretty much literally a type of "speaking 'bot.'"

I've tried a handful of times and just can't get past how unbearably tedious I find writing for loops, so I give up. It's like trying to read the whole Bible and getting bogged down in Leviticus. I'm sure it gets more interesting. I just can't push through that part!

Maybe try Haskell in your next attempt? For one thing, you won't be writing for loops at all. It's also much higher level than most languages

Maybe skip Leviticus and come back to it later?

This is my primary reason, after IP abuse, of disdaining Copilot. We’re still going to need engineers, and I’d rather us make our languages and tooling more expressive than turn into a prompt engineer.

That’s Luddite, anti progressive thinking.

It’s not. I’m not saying things are perfect the way they are now and we shouldn’t look for ways to be productive, it’s that I don’t want us to get stuck in a local maximum like our industry tends to do. If Python isn’t expressive enough, let’s evolve on languages, not pile kludgy code generators on top that must be finessed with special prompts.

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