I do agree that 'engineering' is an extremely offensive term to use for ... essentially 'how to ask for something with context'.
only doing HTML and CSS doesnt have any of this. things are different once you add JS/TS though.
If nothing else engineering is mitigating balloon grabs. Programmers? Developers? They're far more reactive and without intent far more likely to do balloon grabs.
Forgive me, that feels like a post-hoc rationalization of a gut feeling.
I would have said engineering is a set of practices and approaches for solving problems within a framework of requirements and constraints. That's rough, but you get the idea. Software engineering is a sub-discipline of that which is related to the realm of software, just as mechanical engineering and genetic engineering and (perhaps) prompt engineering are just flavors defined by the medium. Software engineering isn't defined by the use of some particular set of tools, I don't think any flavor of engineering is.
Or rather… that they are peddling their ‘knowledge’ of witchcraft as having granted them the power to make an LLM perform useful work.
When what they have is a half-baked set of herbal remedies and magic words handed down (“Greg Rutkowski”) that, if they are any more effective than just placebo, it’s purely because of luck.
Structuring 'better' prompts should simply be that - writing 'better' prompts.
All of these facts are also true of "real engineers", and it's why coders are not "real engineers", regardless of whether they have a CS degree.
There's a lot to unpack here, but I'm not going to bother.
> statistics, topology, thermodynamics, kinetics, quantum mechanics, cellular biology, category theory
I have a CS degree. The only two things from this list that I studied were biology and statistics. The only one I studied with any amount of rigor was statistics, and even that was pretty light. I use none of these in my career software except for some intuition-level statistics on rare occasions. In fact, I use statistics more when I play board games in my free time than I ever do at work.
Your comment doesn't reflect the reality of writing software for what I imagine is the vast majority of people who have CS degrees.
But it never quite reached the level of "Attorney" or "Physician" so we have this ambiguity depending on the field of practice, especially since the explosion of Software Engineer jobs.