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Comment by menacingly | Hacker News Reader

"Prompt Engineering" is a fictional attempt to create space for human intermediaries, and arguments against this are weak and pointless. Disregarding where it is _today_, the goal obviously is for natural language to produce the desired output. It happens to fail at that today, but poking around at whatever arbitrary, unpredictable mutations to the input will get you there (without explanation) isn't a skill.

Even the becoming-cliche "humans don't know what they want" argument is its own counterargument. You're right, humans do not know how to precisely ask for what they want, and yet manage today to navigate around this all the time without learning a new way to communicate.

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My opinion on this comment is that it is completely wrong.

1. Currently, Prompt Engineering works, and that alone is a reasonable reason for people to explore it. The concept of doing nothing about things that work today because there might be a day when they become obsolete makes no sense at all.

2. Prompt Engineering is important and meaningful. Most people are thoroughly incompetent at giving instructions. And it's a core skill of projects. An incompetent person will fail, no matter how competent their subordinates are.

3. PE is something that will be needed even as AI gets better (until we have omnipotent superintelligence). In fact, even giving instructions to humans requires PE. It's a limitation of human language.

4. I think it's also wrong that people's motivation for exploring PE now is an attempt to make room for humans. Have you ever been to an AI drawing community?

5. It's not PE that should exist for human intermediaries, it's the skills to handle AI, including PE. If humans no longer need the skills to deal with AI, it will be AGI by definition. If what you're saying is that when AGI comes along, all humans will be unnecessary, that might be true, but then what you're saying is meaningless.

God we're already making it an acronym?

The goal is to not need a translation layer sure, but the reality is that of having translation layers, and that the ai is not smart enough to understand when it can't accurately respond to a prompt to say so. It's the translator that has the understanding that diffusion won't come up with Santa giving a massage, only receiving one.

Translation is a skill, and translators remain employed today despite ml improvements in automated translation over the years.

Humans do talk in different variations of language for different tasks. Eg. Legalese and code switching.

I'm not sure how you're defining skill, but it seems like you can get better at prompt engineering, and some people are consistently better at it than others. I'd call it a skill, just like framing a search query in Google is a skill. Sorry if that's weak and pointless.

you can get better at astrology, I'd still advise against carving out a niche there. Claiming you can tame a hurricane of untraceable parameters with guesswork, on rapidly changing systems whose designers have the goal of obviating the need to format queries in magical ways, is dicey at best.

I think you're basically saying that this thing is a) a black box, and b) more complex than any human can pretend to understand, even if we cracked open the box and looked inside.

But, that does not close off the possibility of learning what ways we can poke and prod it to affect the results.

It would be interesting to run an experiment to test whether some people are consistently better at generating desirable results from an AI model. My money would be that they can, even at this early stage of "prompt engineering" as a discipline, let alone 5 or ten years from now.

You may also be saying "don't call it engineering, it feels more like black magic," a position I would be sympathetic to. But, I think a lot of realms of engineering deal with uncontrollable elements we don't understand and have to just deal with, with increasing levels of control as our disciplines become more sophisticated.

I actually appreciate the good-faith rephrasing, and it's correct, but I think my precise concern failed to come across. It's not "local man frowns upon change", it's that I think we've created the mirage of place to add value that is very temporary but may look attractive to people perhaps eventually replaced by this very tech. It's a sweet "don't worry" song while an absolutely exploding area of innovation is actively trying to make it exist less.

The problem is calling it "engineering".

Sounds more legit than "prompt wizardry"

Agree, it's such a word people here have strong opinions about.

But what is your suggestion? I feel it would be recieved easily if it was LLM Prompt Cheat sheet or something, though I wouldn't have seen it on HN.

Prompt framing? Prompt optimization?

I’d go with prompt hacking or prompt bashing

Yes the end goal is for the computer to perfectly understand every nuance of a very ambiguous human language, and everyone understands that, but we aren't there yet and may never get there. Until then, prompt engineering is not "fictional" but exists to fill in a real gap in the system.

Just like you can get better are searching things with google or explaining things to a human, you will be able to get better at getting what you want out of chatgpt.

I don't see why you find that controversial.

It's not controversial, it's just clear this will in the not-too-distant future be relegated to the same sort of high school level introductory course that introduces a person to saving files on google drive. I worry that people are believing this will be a thriving space and a new frontier for tech talent, when really they exist to the extent current interfaces are failing. And current interfaces are improving at impressive speed.

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