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Comment by adhamsalama | Hacker News Reader

There is no engineering involved in using AI. It's insulting to call begging an LLM "engineering".

This. Convincing a bullshit generator to give you the right data isn’t engineering, it quackery. But I guess “context quackery” wouldn’t sell as much.

LLMs are quite useful and I leverage them all the time. But I can’t stand these AI yappers saying the same shit over and over again in every media format and trying to sell AI usage as some kind of profound wizardry when it’s not.

It is total quackery. When you zoom out in these discussions you begin to see how the AI yappers and their methodology is just modern-day alchemy with its own jargon and "esoteric" techniques.

See my comment here. These new context engineering techniques are a whole lot less quackery than the prompting techniques from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44428628

"less"

The quackery comes in the application of these techniques, promising that they "work" without ever really showing it. Of course what's suggested in that blog sounds rational -- they're just restating common project management practices.

What makes it quackery is there's no evidence to show that these "suggestions" actually work (and how well) when it comes to using LLMs. There's no measurement, no rigor, no analysis. Just suggestions and anecdotes: "Here's what we did and it worked great for us!" It's like the self-help section of the bookstore, but now we're (as an industry) passing it off as technical content.

That's the definition of a hype cycle. Can't wait for tech to be past it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com