[lolinder]

I think that calling it "prompt engineering" is what made it fail to catch on. We didn't call it "Google engineering" back in the day when you could actually craft a Google search to turn up useful results, we called it "Google-fu" [0].

"Google-fu" sounds like a fun skill to learn and acquire, where "prompt engineering" sounds either like something well out of reach or like pretentious nonsense depending on the audience.

[0] https://blog.codinghorror.com/google-fu/

[fuzztester]

>"Google-fu" sounds like a fun skill to learn and acquire, where "prompt engineering" sounds either like something well out of reach or like pretentious nonsense depending on the audience.

More likely, "prompt engineering" is a marketing term made up by AI marketroids (cf. androids) hoping to make developers feel better about their reduced roles in this "grand new AI age".

[fzzzy]

Prompt-fu sounds cool

[dvfjsdhgfv]

Arguably you could charge more money from courses on prompt engineering than on prompt-fu.

[chipdart]

> I think that calling it "prompt engineering" is what made it fail to catch on.

I don't think so.

I mean, clearly calling it "engineering" threw some people off, in the same blend as some gatekeepers cringe at calling train drivers "railroad engineers". But that's puerile gatekeeping that misses the whole reason why there is a vast need to know how to "engineer prompts".

The truth of the matter is that the focus of "prompt engineering" is being able to put together inputs that solve business problems in professional settings. You need to have full control over the generative process to integrate it's output in a business setting. That requires specialized knowledge way beyond naive requests expressed in natural language.

Complaining about "prompt engineering" because that only focuses on specifying queries and operating a specific service makes as much sense as complaining about SQL/database/postgres engineering because that only focuses on specifying queries and operating a specific service.

Before trying to dismiss "prompt engineering" through gatekeeping logic, first you need to justify why there is no need to know what you're doing to get outputs by feeding the right inputs. Even in subreddits dedicated to using generative AI to create images and videos,they started to outright ban posts where the contents are posted without the prompts used to create it.