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Comment by benjaminwootton | Hacker News Reader

The article tries to make the point that they sound like nonsense buzzwords, but I believe there is some actual depth there.

I would be interested whether or not you agree with that central point?

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I could not agree less with the idea of prompt engineering being an emerging field, or really one that will be here more than a couple of years at best. Right now it’s a stopgap needed because LLMs aren’t actually good enough to translate conversational English into the expected intent. The idea that prompt engineering is here to stay suggests a massive and fundamental inability to conceive of the most likely realities of an actual AI-assisted near future.

I have no idea how someone can simultaneously believe AI is going to become unimaginably capable, but also that that in order to effectively use this extraordinarily capable AI, we will need a highly skilled human to interface with it. If AI really is that capable, it will be able to ask the right questions back and solicit feedback such that it can give satisfactory results to even the lowest common denominator of users.

That is a fair point and I can see how the amount of prompt engineering would reduce. However, even a human has to be told how to solve a task, what tools are available to them, and how to stay within guardrails. Prompt engineering is how that is done.

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