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Comment by time_to_smile | Hacker News Reader

The more seriously I see people take the topic of "prompt engineering" the more deeply depressed I become about this field.

It feels like tutorials on tailoring the emperor's new clothes.

At the same time I feel it's only a matter of time until my job interviews involve questions like "can you provide a few example of where you've used prompt engineering to solve a problem? Describe you prompt engineering process?" and I'm just not sure I can fake it that hard.

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I feel exactly the same way. Let’s do our part and not allow “engineering” to be co-opted in this manner and completely lose all meaning. I’ll settle for “prompt trials”.

I feel the same way about “data science” because there’s no “science” in it; could just call it statistics or whatever, no data science expert is actually called a “scientist” by the society, because we all know it’s not really science.

The popular confusion/conflation of "science" with "engineering" has long been a pet peeve of mine. They are very different things.

If you publish work in a journal or conference that's meaningfully important in your field you are a scientist.

Seems like you forgot that Mathematics is a field that has journals and conferences.

I'm trying to look at it as a powerful new tool like modern IDEs that can make a lot of people's workflow more efficient. If the question comes up in an interview, they're just asking if you have experience with this new tool their team uses, and comparing how you use it to their process. Similarly not having experience with an IDE like Visual Studio might not be a dealbreaker, but if there's another candidate with a ton of experience then it could tip the scales in their favor. Long way of saying, I would try to stay optimistic and just play around with it enough so you can at least bullshit about it if you still don't want to use it.

Be careful what you wish for; you might just get "artisanal handcrafted certified cruelty-free prompts" instead.

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