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Comment by dakom | Hacker News Reader

Why are we calling this "engineering"?

Isn't engineering the application of science to solve problems? (math, definitive logic, etc.)

Maybe one day we'll have instruments that let us reason about the connections between prompts and the exact state of the AI, so that we can understand the mechanics of causation, but until then, I would not think that being good at asking questions is "engineering"

Are most 10 year olds veteran "search engineers"?

Btw I'm asking this slightly tongue-in-cheek, as a discussion point. For example plenty of computer system hacks are done by way of "social engineering", so clearly that term is malleable even within the tech community.

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Author of the guide here. I attempt to address this in the "Why do we need prompt engineering?"[^1] section.

> ... we used an analogy of prompts as the “source code” that a language model “interprets”. Prompt engineering is the art of writing prompts to get the language model to do what we want it to do – just like software engineering is the art of writing source code to get computers to do what we want them to do.

Borrowing from Oxford Dictionary, the definition of "engineering" is:

> the branch of science and technology concerned with the design, building, and use of engines, machines, and structures.

I think it's pretty reasonable to say that "prompt engineering" falls squarely in the realm of "technology concerned with the use of a machine".

[^1]: https://github.com/brexhq/prompt-engineering#why-do-we-need-...

That's extremely broad. I know how to push the buttons on my washing machine. So now I'm a laundering engineer?

Maybe the answer is "yes", but I think it's a bit silly, and detracts from the engineering work that goes into building the machine, i.e. the work of understanding the connections and flow of electricity from button press to pumps and gears turning.

The person who shoveled coal to a steam locomotive was called a railroad engineer. I guess the distinguishing feature here is how much capital is tied to the process and how much value it creates - not how intellectually demanding it is as such.

If you had a button that switched on a thousand washing machines at a time I guess one could flirt with the title "washing engineer".

>The person who shoveled coal to a steam locomotive

was generally called the stoker. Also heard fireman but I find that confusing.

> If you had a button that switched on a thousand washing machines at a time I guess one could flirt with the title "washing engineer".

Since that button probably wouldn't work correctly 100% of the time, the operator would probably be forced to learn about problems and solutions related to that activity. Over time, that person would accumulate experience and knowledge which would make them well suited to that simple job of flipping the switch on and off. And at that point, that person would be more of an engineer than a random person who walked up and flipped the switch.

An _anything_ engineer is just someone who does that thing and the unnamed related things necessary to do the main thing.

Exactly.

The person who shoveled coal to a steam locomotive was called a railroad engineer.

Maintaining a constant head of steam while changing altitude, water level, external temperature, etc using a direct heat source is a really skilled job. Talk to anyone who works on a heritage railway and they'll explain just how hard it is.

I lived in the same city where George Stephenson invented the locomotive, and went to the same pub that the volunteers who worked on a replica went to. It's fascinating, and very much 'proper' engineering.

"Intellectually demanding" was a poor choice of word. I meant to say something along the lines "does not require to invent anything new" - which a railroad engineer does not need to do. That does not mean work they do is low-effort or trivial.

Tweaked my comment a little bit to clarify.

Surely we'd agree that not everyone who uses software is a software engineer, but writing software is generally agreed upon as "software engineering". If you consider my comment as a whole, and the linked document, then the application of the definition makes sense.

Large Language Models are incredibly similar to black-box non-deterministic interpreters. And prompt engineering feels very much like writing code for said interpreter.

I've never heard of non-deterministic programming languages. Is that really a thing?

(I mean - cue the JS jokes and all, but, really?)

Fwiw, to me, writing prompts feels most similar to management, directing, maybe psychotherapy (though I never worked in that, just guessing). Knowing how to adapt and use language to guide the "other" to achieve a goal, but without having insight into the exact way they go about it.

I feel like when I talk to ChatGPT I am directing it. "guide to directing AI bots" has its share of problems too, and "directing prompts" is just flat out unsexy.

I mean, quantum programming is basically non deterministic. It's not a nature of the program though, but the underlying "hardware".

I think here, like in a lot of places in our societies, there's a gap in language. Take the group of someone's grandma, john carmack, a 3rd year uni student and like a guy that writes YAML to control his home automation system.

2 words surely aren't enough. There's no way to draw one line through that group and get any real meaning (unless maybe it's above the grandma)

So, like in other parts of society, if we don't make new words, people will start using the words we already have.

I want someone to write a sci-fi book where our need for new language snowballs with increased technology and ends up being the great filter for life since it grows until no groups can understand each other.

> > the branch of science and technology concerned with the design, building, and use of engines, machines, and structures.

> I think it's pretty reasonable to say that "prompt engineering" falls squarely in the realm of "use of a machine".

It's not just "use of a machine", but rather "the branch of science and technology concerned with the use of machines.

That said, I don't have a stake in this battle. I just wanted to point out that it's easy to forget the earlier context when looking at lists like that!

But writing “source code” is definitively not “software engineering”. It has a name: programming. A software engineer is the person that creates a system from software mostly using software. AI-assistant engineering makes sense.

Prompt crafting is fair, informative, and accurate. And we (should) all know by now that craftsman/artisan != engineer.

Ask your favorite LLM to categorize the following statements as one of { reasonable, wishful } notions:

- writing prompts for LLMs is engineering. The science of engineering effective LLM prompts.

- writing prompts for LLMs is an art*. The art of crafting effective LLM prompts.

* almost all ‘art’ rests on fairly coherent communal ‘logic’ or ‘schools’. What distinguishes art from science is that this logic does not need have any basis in appealing to reason. Aesthetics in sciences, in contrast, is primarily used to select one of many contending scientific theorems in ambiguous contexts (as in “the beauty of the mathematics of the unverifiable <X> theory to me implies its truth”.)

As the head of the Engineering department said the class on day one of Intro to Computer Engineering at RIT in the fall of 1999:

Engineering = Physics + Economics

The physical system here is the LLM and the computing environment that interfaces with the LLM. Prompt engineering would be the knowledge of how to use the LLM in a programmatic manner. There are many cost related trade-offs. More tokens, better response? Can you limit token usage while keeping the quality response basically the same?

Is it not obviously engineering and not just throwing stuff at the wall when you begin to measure the quality of responses with regards to token usage, finding which approaches work and which don't? Or how to handle security issues like prompt injections? Or techniques for using a vector database with latent space embeddings?

Do 10 year olds do that when they use Google?

I think the confusion here is that people think it refers to just using the ChatGPT interface and not wiring up the API to a Python interpreter.

I agree with the tongue-in-cheek and the serious question. I was asking myself this just yesterday.

Britanica's definition is nice (the application of science to the optimum conversion of the resources of nature to the uses of humankind), but the base of all of them is creating from science.

I'm not sure what the researched-and-validated science is behind these prompting guides. They feel like creative works and really feel like they deserve a title highlighting this.

In a related thought, I feel like we might see creative titles growing in respect over the coming years, as humans look for ways to differentiate themselves from knowledgeable machines.

If programming is alchemy, then prompt engineering is more akin to demonic conjurations (communicating with demons):

- the Demon knows almost everything, but it can/will lie and trick your bullshit filters so well

- then, there's the old trope that you-the conjurer might be able to trick the demon and avoid paying the price for its services (prompt injections) †

(dust off your Ars Goetia, my friend)

But, in all seriousness, here's one definition I like:

    engineering:
    the branch of science and technology concerned with the design, building, and use of engines, machines, and *structures*.

I read structures in a more generic sense here (e.g. structures of information). Prompt engineering requires skill, e.g. understanding how transformers on a basic level will make you better at it, but the nature of work is still fuzzy. It's more intuition guided by some general understanding of the system.

I think prompt design would be a better term.

Words shift their meanings and language is a river, so I'm ok with engineering being used this way.

I do have a bigger issue with using AI as an umbrella term, because it seems misleading on purpose. The new meaning is a product of a bunch of people trying to make it sound magical so more money changes hands. That's active disinformation and it's making us collectively slightly more stupid.

† a rooster can be an efficient mode of transport should you wish to breach the contract yourself (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Twardowski)

> If programming is alchemy, then prompt engineering is more akin to demonic conjurations (communicating with demons):

Honest question. Do you think this analogy is anyway helpful?

Some people are way too butt-hurt over a choice of phrasing in a language that absolutely allows for this kind of flexibility. But mostly it's probably some dork in the back fuming away, muttering "I'm a REAL engineer! I went to school to get that title! How dare these intellectual infants abscond with MY valor!"

> Isn't engineering the application of science to solve problems? (math, definitive logic, etc.)

Most definitely not. Engineering more often than not preceeds the science. You don't have to have an analytical and theoretical understanding of something in order to harness it and make practical use of it.

In reality, there's a strong feedback loop, where practical hacks will guide the science, the development of which will can then be used to make better practical applications, which can uncover new unknowns, which can then be incorporated into the science etc. The development of electricity and magnetism and or steam engines and thermodynamics are both great examples of this.

Let's take airplanes as an example.

1. Do we start calling travel agents "aviation engineers" because they use airplanes to solve problems?

2. I sure hope the engineers who build planes aren't just winging it (ba doom pssh)

3. Context matters. Scientific knowledge increases over time, but isn't there a difference between willfull and unavoidable ignorance? If an engineer from the early days of flight were transported to SpaceX today, but they ignored the math and constructed rockets that we know with certainty will not fly, but they are convinced it will work due to sheer inner conviction, that's no longer engineering imho. Even if it may have been in their time, as long as they were using the known science of their day.

Engineering, the action of working artfully to bring something about.

What's the difference between engineering and design?

Design is part of engineering, but engineers will go on to build for example. Many folks like to gatekeep the use of engineer as a word. Mostly it just comes down to the fact that a displine hasn't matured yet and isnt' taught in a rigourous and formal manner. It is still engineering. See Network Engineering for example. Plenty of people building complex systems at scales never before seen. Even more that just about know how traceroute works but still building networks. They are all engineers of a young field of engineering.

Did you even read the article? You are writing programs whose output will be put in hidden prompts. Nobody is claiming that users are prompt engineers. Math is a dying art, programming is a science.

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