(Edit: I agree with the premise of article, I just wanted to rant about about AI bros)
(Edit: I'm not trying to imply anything about the linked author of this piece. They actually do have code examples!)
FWIW, I don't think learning to code is inherently virtuous. I do think putting in the time to be good at something is more virtuous than trying to find the easiest way to latch onto whatever the hot new industry is, which is my impression of most prompt engineering at this point.
My experience as a test dev is that testers, especially the ones who can't code, are into credentialism and overly-technical taxonomies that describe their field. I claim people who can't do get certified (and those who make money from the certifiables teach).
"Everything is about to change. You are being left behind. Read this thread to know more"
Basically, the author is arguing that just fiddling around with the words you enter in a ChatGPT window is not prompt "engineering". Instead, he talks about some specific techniques for e.g. blending prompts, indicating some words deserve more attention, etc.
And yes, I know this is a classic hacker news trope, I just couldn't help myself
Even this post (which I think is making some pretty well informed and intentioned suggestions) exists largely because getting exactly what you want out of an LLM can be pretty difficult. Even fairly static tasks like data extraction can have aggravatingly variable outputs. I don't think that most of these are the _right_ way to get to the goal but are rather, largely clever hacks that can help a user try and nudge the LLM towards the desired latent space when adjusting the instructions fails.
Maybe they were there all along and people just stopped ignoring them? Maybe it's all of the hucksters whose absurd coin schemes dried up or never panned out looking for a new hook?
I've worked in PHP most of my career, but there's more engineering in an mvc than using an auto install script and installing and configuring, plugins.i guess my point is, I kinda just roll my eyes anymore.
I feel the same way with prompt engineers who don't know how to use langchain or llama index etc and aren't working on some kind of cognitive architecture to milk gpt4 for all it's worth.
tldr: I think prompt engineering is a great, legit field, but half the people in it are pretenders, although, if they can use gpt half as good as they claim, then gpt can handle most of the coding etc.. so it's probably easier to blur the line a little.