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prompt engineering can definitely deliver value for a customer, but i don't think it will deliver value to a developer in terms of building a sustainable career

prompt engineering can definitely deliver value for a customer, but i don't think it will deliver value to a developer in terms of building a sustainable career. a different analogy that gets at my original concern: becoming an expert prompt engineer for an particular LLM is like becoming a power user for a piece of proprietary software that isn't getting any more updates.

BoorishBears 3y ago
The first point doesn't follow the second: there will always be a sustainable career in building software that delivers value. In tech we take it for granted that just because there's some new hotness everyone wants to jump on it day 1. GPT 5 could drop tomorrow and if your tool delivers value using 3.5, it's not going to magically stop delivering value, and in most verticals people will prefer your battle tested 3.5 to some brand new 5. And if 5 does simplify prompts for your use case and there'll still only be two options: - making a the same thing as what you made with 3.5 is now trivial... in which case you still have the mindshare and the distribution solved to a degree your newly enabled clones don't. - making a better version of what you made is now trivial... in which case you can just as trivially improve your version and already have the mindshare and distribution solved. At the end of the day software developers often struggle to fit software into the larger ecosystem it slots into before it becomes something valuable, and to be GPT has been an amazing case study in the fact. I think the use of the word engineering did half the damage, and I think people confusing the twitter memes with the interesting attempts at prompt engineering (via ReACT, Gorilla, etc) did the other half, but at the end of the day I think a lot of people will be left kicking themselves when "misguided prompt engineers" end up solving real useful problems in ways they didn't think were possible well before we reach the arbitrary goalposts for foundation models that people keep setting up.

BoorishBears 3y ago

The first point doesn't follow the second: there will always be a sustainable career in building software that delivers value. In tech we take it for granted that just because there's some new hotness everyone wants to jump on it day 1. GPT 5 could drop tomorrow and if your tool delivers value using 3.5, it's not going to magically stop delivering value, and in most verticals people will prefer your battle tested 3.5 to some brand new 5. And if 5 does simplify prompts for your use case and there'll still only be two options: - making a the same thing as what you made with 3.5 is now trivial... in which case you still have the mindshare and the distribution solved to a degree your newly enabled clones don't. - making a better version of what you made is now trivial... in which case you can just as trivially improve your version and already have the mindshare and distribution solved. At the end of the day software developers often struggle to fit software into the larger ecosystem it slots into before it becomes something valuable, and to be GPT has been an amazing case study in the fact. I think the use of the word engineering did half the damage, and I think people confusing the twitter memes with the interesting attempts at prompt engineering (via ReACT, Gorilla, etc) did the other half, but at the end of the day I think a lot of people will be left kicking themselves when "misguided prompt engineers" end up solving real useful problems in ways they didn't think were possible well before we reach the arbitrary goalposts for foundation models that people keep setting up.