Ask HN: Is mastering prompt engineering a productive use of my time?

Or will this whole idea that we need to learn exactly how to chat with a computer to get the desired output a fools errand which will become obsolete in the near future?

For most of the last year I thought it was a thing that only hobbiest were doing. But I’m starting to learn how many established companies and their very educated engineering teams are just leveraging OpenAI and its relatives by sending paragraphs of text to them. Paragraphs with instructions they’ve spent massive amounts of time fine tuning.

It would seem to me that this is not the best way to get insights out of LLMs in a desired format. Calling a function where you can break down the criteria you want it to use for its input and output seems much more efficient.