[eddsh1994]

I wonder if "prompt engineering" will be replaced by improvements to LLMs within the next couple years and this is just a bad DX step gap along the journey

[13years]

Prompt engineering is really more like the art of exploring the emergent behavior of the LLMs. Unlike traditional software that has known features and capabilities. We build a model and then we literally don't know what it does until we explore it.

[saliagato]

wow

[simonw]

I wrote a response to this argument here: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Feb/21/in-defense-of-prompt-e...

Short version: I think prompt engineering will be an important skill for a very long time. Using these systems to the maximum of their (currently unknown) potential will always involve expert knowledge!

[eddsh1994]

Thanks!

[ravenstine]

As long as language is used, prompt engineering will always be a thing. The term "prompt engineering" is just a fancy way of describing being a good communicator.

[crooked-v]

A good communicator, but also a good sophist. For example, I discovered pretty quick that I could twist the ChatGPT 4 guardrails into knots, even without "DAN" prompts, just by feeding it a lot of philosophical nonsense about semantics and meaning.

[awb]

Communication is basically prompt engineering.

You can say whatever you like and live with the results, or try to phrase your communication in a way that elicits the kind of response you want from the other party.

We’ve engineered it away with computers where we learn a programming language or the rules of an operating system and the acceptable input is translated into a deterministic result.

But natural language is much more creative and open ended.

[ahzhou]

Advances seem to make some of the hacks less necessary (such as CoT behaving better with newlines), but precisely specifying what you want will always be useful.

[dpflan]

It pretty much seems like it, as this is the infancy of LLM UX.

[alphanullmeric]

Prompt “engineering” currently reeks of the A in STEAM