[Terr_]

LLM Prompt Engineering: Injecting your own arbitrary data into a what is ultimately an undifferentiated input stream of word-tokens from no particular source, hoping your sequence will be most influential in the dream-generator output, compared to a sequence placed there by another person, or a sequence that they indirectly caused the system to emit that then got injected back into itself.

Then play whack-a-mole until you get what you want, enough of the time, temporarily.

[criddell]

It probably shouldn't be called prompt engineering, even informally. The work of an engineer shouldn't require hope.

[fennecfoxy]

Engineering requires hope; anything outside the bounds of our understanding (like exactly how these models work) requires it.

Scientists fold proteins, _hoping_ that they'll find the right sequence, based on all they currently know (best guess).

Without hope there is no need try; without trying there is no discovery.

[fshbbdssbbgdd]

I don’t think the people who engineered the Golden Gate Bridge, Apollo 7, or the transistor would have succeeded if they didn’t have hope.

[Terr_]

I think OP's point is that "hope" is never a substitute for "a battery of experiments on dependably constant phenomena and supported by strong statistical analysis."

[sirspacey]

This is the fundamental change in the concept of programming

From computer’s doing exactly what you state, with all the many challenges that creates

To is probabilistically solving for your intent, with all the many challenges that creates

Fair to say human beings probably need both to effectively communicate

Will be interesting to see if the current GenAI + ML + prompt engineering + code is sufficient

[mplewis]

Nah man. This isn’t solving anything. This is praying to a machine god but it’s an autocomplete under the hood.

[Loughla]

Honestly, this sort of programming (whether it's in quotes or not) will be unbelievably life changing when it works.

I can absolutely put into words what I want, but I cannot program it because of all the variables. When a computer can build the code for me based on my description... Holy cow.

[VirusNewbie]

if this doesn't work well with super high level languages, why would it work really well with LLMs?

[Loughla]

I can have a conversation with LLM's. they can walk me through the troubleshooting without prior knowledge of programming languages.

That seems like a massive advantage.

[valval]

What a silly thing to say. Engineering is just problem solving.

[llmfan]

It should be called prompt science.

[Loughla]

It's literature.

I never thought my English degree would be so useful.

This is only half in jest by the way.

[llmfan]

So many different areas of knowledge can be leveraged, as long as you're able to experiment and learn.

[brookst]

As a product manager this is largely my experience with developers.

[Terr_]

Well, hopefully your developers are substantially more capable, able to clearly track the difference between your requests versus those of other stakeholders... And they don't get confused by overhearing their own voice repeating words from other people. :p

[visarga]

We all use abstractions, and abstractions, good as they are to fight complexity, are also bad because sometimes they hide details we need to know. In other words, we don't genuinely understand anything. We're parrots of abstractions invented elsewhere and not fully grokked. In a company there is no single human who understands everything, it's a patchwork of partial understandings coupled functionally together. Even a medium sized git repo suffers from the same issue - nobody understands it fully.

[brookst]

Wholeheartedly agree. Which is why the most valuable people in a company are those who can cross abstraction layers, vertically or horizontally, and reduce information loss from boundaries between abstractions.

[Terr_]

Some executive: "That's nice, but what new feature have you shipped for me recently?"

[brookst]

Hey, you read my review!

[Bluestein]

... or - worse even - something you think is what you want, because you know not better, but happens to be a wholy (or - worse - even just subtly partially incorrect) confabulated answer.-

[ljlolel]

same as with asking humans to do something

[ImHereToVote]

When we do prompt engineering for humans, we use the term Public Relations.

[manuelmoreale]

There’s also Social Engineering but I guess that’s a different thing :)

[TeMPOraL]

No, that's exactly the thing - it's prompt injection attacks on humans.