Post

The reason I think it's important to spread the message that using modern AI tools is difficult is that I don't want people being embarrassed to ask questions about how to use them - or quietly assuming they "aren't smart enough" and giving up

Oh man, I remember Reddit writhing in scorn when the term “prompt engineering” took off. The assumption was that it’s so trivially easy there was no need to overcomplicate it. Fast forward to now, when Anthropic Console will burn 60 seconds optimizing a CoT prompt for you.

To be fair, the complaint was you won’t end up with a ‘prompt engineering’ role. Which is true. Engineers are expected to learn how to engineer prompts, you don’t go hiring for someone to do this exclusively.

I think we are in the early days yet. We don't know how specialized LLMs may become. A sufficiently specialized LLM in the future may well trade features like constraints on prompting for more deterministic or correct output. The analogy today is database query engineers.

I think prompt engineering was corrupted to mean "being good at prompting", which is clearly more a skill than a speciality But meanwhile the term "AI engineer" started to establish itself, which is the specialty of knowing how to build systems on top of this stuff - way more than just prompting

I think "AI Engineer" will prove to be too broad a title to be meaningful. It could be anything from implementing neural nets in code or silicon to training, inference, or fine-tuning. It could be the AI equivalent of search, or NLP, or image processing, or decision analysis, or programming.