Hacker News Reader

Comment by naasking | Hacker News Reader

> Organizing things with made-up HTML tags because the models seem to like that for some reason. Where does engineering come into it?

You just described one critical aspect of engineering: discovering a property of a system and feeding that knowledge back into a systematic, iterative process of refinement.

View on HN

I can't think of many engineering disciplines that do things this way. "This seems to work, I don't know how or why it works, I don't even know if it's possible to know how or why it works, but I will just apply this moving forward, crossing my fingers that in future situations it will work by analogy."

If the act of discovery and iterative refinement makes prompting an engineering discipline, then is raising a baby also an engineering discipline?

Lots of engineering disciplines work this way. For instance, materials science is still crude, we don't have perfect theories for why some materials have the properties they do (like concrete or superconductors), we simply quantify what those properties are under a wide range of conditions and then make use of those materials under suitable conditions.

> then is raising a baby also an engineering discipline?

The key to science and engineering is repeatability. Raising a baby is an N=1 trial, no guarantees of repeatability.

I think the point is that it's more about trial and error, and less about blindly winging it. When you don't know how a system seems to work, you latch on to whatever seems to initially work and proceed from there to find patterns. It's not an entire approach to engineering, just a small part of the process.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com