[xmprt]

I'll go in the other direction and say that if you're spending a lot of your time learning to prompt better then you're wasting it because LLMs are only going to get better at understanding your intent regardless of "prompt engineering". The JSON API example to wire up a database can be one-shot pretty easily by the latest models without much context and without setting up any harness. The more time you spend perfecting your harness, the more time you would have wasted when the next model comes out to make it obsolete.

[majormajor]

The hardest thing about software engineering has always been that your intent often has to be decided on the fly once you get into complicated edge cases, weird-or-legacy-business requirements, or things that the spec literally has no answers for.

Letting the tool figure out your assumed intent on those things is a double-edged sword. Better than you never even thinking of them. But potentially either subtle broken contracts that test coverage missed (since nobody has full combinatoric coverage, or the patience to run it) or just further steps into a messy codebase that will cost ever-more tokens to change safely.

[derangedHorse]

I was thinking of this interpretation as I read that:

"I'll go in the other direction and say that if you're spending a lot of your time learning to [program] better then you're wasting it because [computer]s are only going to get better at [computing] regardless of "[software] engineering". The JSON API example to wire up a database can be [run] pretty easily by the latest [computer]s without much [design] and without setting up any [optimizations]. The more time you spend perfecting your [program], the more time you would have wasted when the next [computer] comes out to make it obsolete."

[apsurd]

but then how can the parent comment land? "you're just not prompting right"

[xmprt]

I don't think it does. If I had to guess, the top comment was using an older version of AI or a local model which wouldn't be able to solve the JSON API task. A lot of AI skepticism comes from people who used it once a while back and decided not to keep up with the latest developments. If I only had experience with gpt-3.5 then I'd also assume what the original commenter said.

[majormajor]

An experiment I'd love to do, but which isn't actually possible anymore, is run GPT 3.5 or the original 4 API release through a modern "agentic" harness for a task like this.

I think 3.5 would probably need more frequent intervention than a lot of harnesses give. But I bet 4 could do a simple JSON API one-shot with the right harness. Just back then I had to manually be the harness.