Understanding with complex man made abstractions is much more difficult than plugging data into a thermodynamics calculator
When the GP says "professional engineer", I suspect they mean the big boy official kind [1] that goes to prison if they sign off on a negligent design. It's not a question of difficulty but responsibility and qualifications (though to be clear, the PE is considered more time consuming to prepare for than the BAR exam and it's definitely much harder than plugging numbers into formulas).
It’s more than just using ChatGPT.
High value prompts are used in API calls where performance, security and variable substitution all come into play. These queries can reach thousands of words/tokens.
A developer who spends all day writing prompts is at least as respectable as one who spends theirs writing SQL.
Ever called yourself "software engineer"?
Edit: https://i.imgur.com/V1kgSNt.png
Ah, even better, you call yourself a "blockchain engineer"... Is that any more "engineering" than "prompt engineering"?
Yes?
- To me: software engineering is a structured, semi-rigorous profession, that seeks to use common methodologies to solve problems. It is technical in nature and can be approached abstractly or practically.
- I think 'prompt engineering' is misleading because it implies the user is doing something more complicated than they are. Since engineering requires technical knowledge to do and the key breakthrough of LLMs is a system that can respond to human-language, the technical-sounding title actually undermines the utility of what LLMs provide.
- Given the above: you wouldn't really want users to think of ChatGPT as a tool that only nerds can use. I wasn't just dunking on ChatGPT tinkers.
- I have 10 years of engineering experience where I specialise in arcane systems (p2p networking, smart contracts, asset security, trading, etc.) I have more experience than a junior dev but definitely not as much experience as some HNs. I do think crafting text templates is not 'engineering' and using ChatGPT is not meant to require such a skillset.
https://lilianweng.github.io/posts/2023-03-15-prompt-enginee...
There is more depth and rigor to Prompt Engineering than what the AI snake oil merchants on twitter would have you believe.
Writing a prompt that runs thousands of times a day in a production setting, where extra words result in unnecessary spending? Closer to engineering.