"prompt engineering" in general just boggles my mind. It is amazing how all of this investment has just created software that doesn't follow instructions well.
you're not wrong. there is a part to this that does feel like a devolution of engineering when we're just asking the computer really really nicely to do the thing we want.
on the otherhand, LLMs are a really easy way to get results that are previously fairly difficult. While i was tooking dinner last night I built a tool that turned movie puns like "the podchowski casters" into an actual director, using llms. it wasn't that hard.
It's a tiny fraction of the amount of work it takes to get people to build software to specifications. There is an entire professional discipline dedicated to this, and we're here just giving a name to the bucket of tools you use to get LLMs to do some of the same things.
It can also handle vague stuff.
That's certainly more powerful than a regular computer language.