Comment by krackers | Hacker News Reader

Comment by krackers | Hacker News Reader

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>This morning, I brushed and flossed, which makes me a Plaque Removal Engineer. I then used my skills as a Room Tidyness Engineer to make the bed. After that, I engineered the harness onto my dog and took her on a walk: Canine Fitness Engineer. I engineered the water to a higher temperature using the kettle, and poured it over some coffee grounds to create a chemical reaction in my morning brew: Yeah, that's right, Caffeine Engineer. After this incredibly productive morning, I got in the car and drove to my job as a computer programmer.

-mlsu: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34884683

At this point the word "engineer" has lost its original meaning. Until there's a formal theory of how we can interact with LLMs and you make use of that in a systematic fashion, "prompt engineering" is really closer to "prompt artist."

> At this point the word "engineer" has lost its original meaning. Until there's a formal theory of how we can interact with LLMs and you make use of that in a systematic fashion, "prompt engineering" is really closer to "prompt artist."

Interesting angle. Are you saying there are rarely any "software engineers" out there, that they are all merely "software artists"? Cause none of these uses a formal theory for their craft. If they were then all those highly opinionated discussions of whether to use goto in C or what are the greatest flaws of node.js would just not exist.

Correct, in my eyes "software engineering" in the sense of "person who glues libraries together to build systems" should not yet be called an engineering discipline because there isn't yet a rigorous enough theory on why something should be designed one way as opposed to another. We are still in the stage of figuring out best practices and making things more rigorous (maybe the functional programming folks will end up contributing something here, but I don't know enough about category theory).

There are other narrower senses of "software engineer" such as "person who optimizes code" and to me those more qualify as engineering because we not only have a decent enough theoretical background (see Agner Fog's work) but also can experimentally verify things. On the other hand it's a lot harder to quantitatively say if one design is better than another.

I think there's also some work in terms of rigorously modeling concurrent/distributed systems (Lamport's TLA+) work which I'd like to see more of.

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