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Prompt engineering looks exactly like how beginner programmers throw spaghetti code against the wall to see what sticks. Lines and lines of poorly formatted cod

Prompt engineering looks exactly like how beginner programmers throw spaghetti code against the wall to see what sticks. Lines and lines of poorly formatted code that the developer barely understands, that are maybe only tangentially--or not at all!--related to the task at hand. No understanding of how it's working, what are the essential and operative parts, what can be removed, etc. Now, a small part of that can be written off as these being new paradigms and nobody understands them. But prompt engineering is, in much larger part, completely unlike writing code in a programming language, because it can never be understood "from first principles", because neural networks are inscrutable and stochastic by their very nature. It's like trying to write production code in an esolang like Malbolge.

TeMPOraL 4y ago
> But prompt engineering is, in much larger part, completely unlike writing code in a programming language, because it can never be understood "from first principles", because neural networks are inscrutable and stochastic by their very nature. Herein lies the problem, though. Either there are patterns to it, which can be discovered, formalized and understood, or there are no patterns to it. If it's the former, sticking to natural language is stupid, for the same reason eyeballing something is stupid, when a mathematical formula will yield you better results for less effort. If it's the latter, sticking to natural language is stupid too, because the whole system is useless - if there are no patterns to study, you may just as well flip a coin or read from /dev/urandom. Now, the very existence of prompt engineering tells us we're likely dealing with the first case - with understandable patterns. However, our systems are not black boxes. Prompt engineering is, at its best, turning interactions with LLMs into an empirical science, which makes no sense when dealing with human-made artifacts. We don't need to discover the patterns, we can read them off the thing, and we can adjust the thing to manifest different patterns. > It's like trying to write production code in an esolang like Malbolge. It's more like trying to learn programming via scientific method: running sets of random characters through the compiler, evaluating output, making a hypothesis, running more random strings through the compiler, checking if that proves or disproves the hypothesis, and adjusting the next iteration to generate slightly less random character strings - rinse, repeat. Going through all that effort is stupid, because you could just pick up a book instead - programming is a man-made job, and all the rules are designed in.

TeMPOraL 4y ago

> But prompt engineering is, in much larger part, completely unlike writing code in a programming language, because it can never be understood "from first principles", because neural networks are inscrutable and stochastic by their very nature. Herein lies the problem, though. Either there are patterns to it, which can be discovered, formalized and understood, or there are no patterns to it. If it's the former, sticking to natural language is stupid, for the same reason eyeballing something is stupid, when a mathematical formula will yield you better results for less effort. If it's the latter, sticking to natural language is stupid too, because the whole system is useless - if there are no patterns to study, you may just as well flip a coin or read from /dev/urandom. Now, the very existence of prompt engineering tells us we're likely dealing with the first case - with understandable patterns. However, our systems are not black boxes. Prompt engineering is, at its best, turning interactions with LLMs into an empirical science, which makes no sense when dealing with human-made artifacts. We don't need to discover the patterns, we can read them off the thing, and we can adjust the thing to manifest different patterns. > It's like trying to write production code in an esolang like Malbolge. It's more like trying to learn programming via scientific method: running sets of random characters through the compiler, evaluating output, making a hypothesis, running more random strings through the compiler, checking if that proves or disproves the hypothesis, and adjusting the next iteration to generate slightly less random character strings - rinse, repeat. Going through all that effort is stupid, because you could just pick up a book instead - programming is a man-made job, and all the rules are designed in.