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Isn’t engineering an exact science while prompt engineering is completely not? Although, even software engineering being an exact science, it is a funny one: m

Isn’t engineering an exact science while prompt engineering is completely not? Although, even software engineering being an exact science, it is a funny one: most of us don’t get certified as like, let’s say, mechanical engineers do. Would they say we are engineers? So perhaps the “engineer” term got overloaded in recent years?

groestl 3y ago
I am a Software Engineer, I am certified (since in my country, they do so, just as with Mechanical Engineers). Still think it's overloaded though.
- pavel_lishin 3y ago
  Canada?
  - groestl 3y ago
    Austria
    - wil421 3y ago
      How does certification work? I’d imagine it would be in a less abstracted language like C or C++. The problem for me is most of my schooling was based on web technologies and 2 classes of Java. I wound hate having to studying for a C based test when the area I work in is all web tech. Same could be said of Java. I learned it in school and haven’t used it in 10 years except for it being the backend on my first front end dev project.
- KnobbleMcKnees 3y ago
  People who have not studied and been given that distinction in engineering going on to call themselves engineers is the reason the term is overloaded. I've always assumed there's a near 100% overlap between people using the term wrongly to describe any programming activity, and people complaining that it has no meaning or is self-aggrandisement
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- elzbardico 3y ago
  In my country there used to be some 5 years (realistically 6 for most students) Computer Engineering programs that were basically electronic engineering with selected classes from computer science tackled on top of it. And as Electronic Engineering programs used to have a lot of classes from Civil Engineering tackled upon it, legally said Computer Engineers were legally licensed to build small 3 floor buildings.
PartiallyTyped 3y ago
what does “exact” mean? If we are being pedantic and literal, this is exact in the sense that for identical seeds you get identical results.
EGreg 3y ago
Anyway, the best engineer for ChatGPT prompt can be ChatGPT itself. People seem to think that “automation will create new jobs”, but in the age or AI, those job opprtunities will be very temporary as the companies making the AI automate that thin layer. Similarly, people think that humans will control AIs. That’s a bit quaint, a bit like humans controlling a corporation. The thin layer of “control” can be easily swapped out and present an improvement in the market, so that the number of totally autonomous (no human in the loop) workflows will grow. That can include predictive policing with Palantir (thanks Peter Thiel!), autonomous killbots in war etc. Seeing how reckless companies have been in releasing the current AI in an arms race, I don’t see how they would be restrained in a literal arms race of slaughterbot swarms and panopticon camera meshes. PS: I remember this exact phase when computers like Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov. For a while he and others advocated “centaurs” — humans collaborating with computers. But the last decade hardly anyone will claim that a system with humans in the loop can beat a system that’s fully automated: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_chess https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_chess
mellosouls 3y ago
Software engineer has always been a daft, grandiose term that seems aimed at prestige rather than reality in the majority of cases. If coders can call themselves engineers, no reason why anybody else solving puzzles for a living can't.
- groestl 3y ago
  Don't want to argue against you, since the term is definitely misused for signaling a lot of things, but in a stricter sense, software engineering is not about the puzzle, it's about the whole pipeline surrounding it.
- xmcqdpt2 3y ago
  In my opinion, coding is a craft. As software has only existed for like 70 years, we are more like the guilds building cathedrals in the middle ages than like modern civil engineering. One day I think there will be true software engineering. When that happens you won't be able to start software projects without certifications, and most people (or programs!) who actually do the coding will be following careful plans and instructions from the engineers who designed the project. I for one am very happy software isn't fully professionalized yet!
  - groestl 3y ago
    You will need a software engineer to argue in your favor before the court ;)
  - tough 3y ago
    > One day I think there will be true software engineering. When that happens you won't be able to start software projects without certifications, and most people (or programs!) who actually do the coding will be following careful plans and instructions from the engineers who designed the project. Sounds really bad. Software can't fall on your head and kill you, not all of it at least. Different software should require different professionals building it. And it's usually not about the software but about the management telling the engineers to take shortcuts or whatever (Boeing comes to mind)
FishInTheWater 3y ago
Prompt "engineering" is just writing prayers to forest faeries. Whilst BASIC/JavaScript/etc are all magic incantations to a child, a child will soon figure out there's underlaying logic, and learn the ability to reason about what code does, and what certain changes will do. With prompts, it's all faerie logic. There is nothing to learn, there are only magic incantations that change drastically if the model is updated. Worse yet, the incantations cannot be composed. E.g. take the SQL statement "SELECT column FROM table WHERE column = [%s]". For any given string you insert here, the output is predictable. You can even know which characters would trigger an injection attack. With prompts you cannot predict results. Any word, phrase, or sequence of characters may upset the faeries and cause the model to misbehave in who knows what way. No processing of user-input will stop injection attacks. Whilst it's dubious to call current software development practices "engineering", it's utterly ridiculous to do so for prompt-writing.
- kordlessagain 3y ago
  In "The Information," James Gleick discusses a concept related to our current discourse. In the days when computers were merely an array of switching circuits, luminaries such as Claude Shannon believed that "thinking" could be captured in a structured format of logical representation. However, even with formally composable languages like JavaScript, a semblance of unpredictability — akin to the "faerie logic" metaphor — still persists. Languages evolve over time; Python, for instance, with its various imports that constantly disrupt my code, serves as a good example. This is perhaps the reason behind the emergence of containers to ensure code consistency. While some elements may be more "composable" than others, it appears increasingly unrealistic in today's world to encapsulate thought processes or interactions with systems within a rigid logical framework. Large Language Models (LLMs) will keep evolving and improving, making continual interaction with them unavoidable. The notion that we can pass a set of code or words through them once and expect a flawless result is simply illogical. I firmly believe that any effective system should incorporate a robust user interaction component, regardless of the specific task or problem at hand.
  - FishInTheWater 3y ago
School-Cotton 3y ago
“Engineer” originally just meant someone who builds engines (in a broad sense of that word). The formal titles requiring certification, etc. are the more recent development.
- ris58h 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineer > The word engineer (Latin ingeniator) is derived from the Latin words ingeniare ("to contrive, devise") and ingenium ("cleverness").
larodi 3y ago
you make a valid point, and no - we are not engineers. we are people with printed labels at best, where the label says architect or engineer. but most of these people with these labels don't even have a degree, which is the prerequisite to have this designations. architects also typically need to comply for a local guild. we, the IT crowd, are long over-due for this formalization of the professions.
- aiisjustanif 3y ago
  I feel like many places have tried this and didn’t like it or molded it into a Frankenstein. The idea of an engineer that researches, designs, tests, and measures and a programmer that implements seemed to cost too much (not just monetarily) for the industry that employees them and there isn’t the sufficient need to regulate all sun-groups of the industries that employ software programmers / engineers.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

groestl 3y ago

I am a Software Engineer, I am certified (since in my country, they do so, just as with Mechanical Engineers). Still think it's overloaded though.

pavel_lishin 3y ago
Canada?
- groestl 3y ago
  Austria
  - wil421 3y ago
    How does certification work? I’d imagine it would be in a less abstracted language like C or C++. The problem for me is most of my schooling was based on web technologies and 2 classes of Java. I wound hate having to studying for a C based test when the area I work in is all web tech. Same could be said of Java. I learned it in school and haven’t used it in 10 years except for it being the backend on my first front end dev project.
KnobbleMcKnees 3y ago
People who have not studied and been given that distinction in engineering going on to call themselves engineers is the reason the term is overloaded. I've always assumed there's a near 100% overlap between people using the term wrongly to describe any programming activity, and people complaining that it has no meaning or is self-aggrandisement
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
elzbardico 3y ago
In my country there used to be some 5 years (realistically 6 for most students) Computer Engineering programs that were basically electronic engineering with selected classes from computer science tackled on top of it. And as Electronic Engineering programs used to have a lot of classes from Civil Engineering tackled upon it, legally said Computer Engineers were legally licensed to build small 3 floor buildings.

PartiallyTyped 3y ago

what does “exact” mean? If we are being pedantic and literal, this is exact in the sense that for identical seeds you get identical results.

EGreg 3y ago

Anyway, the best engineer for ChatGPT prompt can be ChatGPT itself. People seem to think that “automation will create new jobs”, but in the age or AI, those job opprtunities will be very temporary as the companies making the AI automate that thin layer. Similarly, people think that humans will control AIs. That’s a bit quaint, a bit like humans controlling a corporation. The thin layer of “control” can be easily swapped out and present an improvement in the market, so that the number of totally autonomous (no human in the loop) workflows will grow. That can include predictive policing with Palantir (thanks Peter Thiel!), autonomous killbots in war etc. Seeing how reckless companies have been in releasing the current AI in an arms race, I don’t see how they would be restrained in a literal arms race of slaughterbot swarms and panopticon camera meshes. PS: I remember this exact phase when computers like Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov. For a while he and others advocated “centaurs” — humans collaborating with computers. But the last decade hardly anyone will claim that a system with humans in the loop can beat a system that’s fully automated: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_chess https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_chess

mellosouls 3y ago

Software engineer has always been a daft, grandiose term that seems aimed at prestige rather than reality in the majority of cases. If coders can call themselves engineers, no reason why anybody else solving puzzles for a living can't.

groestl 3y ago
Don't want to argue against you, since the term is definitely misused for signaling a lot of things, but in a stricter sense, software engineering is not about the puzzle, it's about the whole pipeline surrounding it.
xmcqdpt2 3y ago
In my opinion, coding is a craft. As software has only existed for like 70 years, we are more like the guilds building cathedrals in the middle ages than like modern civil engineering. One day I think there will be true software engineering. When that happens you won't be able to start software projects without certifications, and most people (or programs!) who actually do the coding will be following careful plans and instructions from the engineers who designed the project. I for one am very happy software isn't fully professionalized yet!
- groestl 3y ago
  You will need a software engineer to argue in your favor before the court ;)
- tough 3y ago
  > One day I think there will be true software engineering. When that happens you won't be able to start software projects without certifications, and most people (or programs!) who actually do the coding will be following careful plans and instructions from the engineers who designed the project. Sounds really bad. Software can't fall on your head and kill you, not all of it at least. Different software should require different professionals building it. And it's usually not about the software but about the management telling the engineers to take shortcuts or whatever (Boeing comes to mind)

FishInTheWater 3y ago

Prompt "engineering" is just writing prayers to forest faeries. Whilst BASIC/JavaScript/etc are all magic incantations to a child, a child will soon figure out there's underlaying logic, and learn the ability to reason about what code does, and what certain changes will do. With prompts, it's all faerie logic. There is nothing to learn, there are only magic incantations that change drastically if the model is updated. Worse yet, the incantations cannot be composed. E.g. take the SQL statement "SELECT column FROM table WHERE column = [%s]". For any given string you insert here, the output is predictable. You can even know which characters would trigger an injection attack. With prompts you cannot predict results. Any word, phrase, or sequence of characters may upset the faeries and cause the model to misbehave in who knows what way. No processing of user-input will stop injection attacks. Whilst it's dubious to call current software development practices "engineering", it's utterly ridiculous to do so for prompt-writing.

kordlessagain 3y ago
In "The Information," James Gleick discusses a concept related to our current discourse. In the days when computers were merely an array of switching circuits, luminaries such as Claude Shannon believed that "thinking" could be captured in a structured format of logical representation. However, even with formally composable languages like JavaScript, a semblance of unpredictability — akin to the "faerie logic" metaphor — still persists. Languages evolve over time; Python, for instance, with its various imports that constantly disrupt my code, serves as a good example. This is perhaps the reason behind the emergence of containers to ensure code consistency. While some elements may be more "composable" than others, it appears increasingly unrealistic in today's world to encapsulate thought processes or interactions with systems within a rigid logical framework. Large Language Models (LLMs) will keep evolving and improving, making continual interaction with them unavoidable. The notion that we can pass a set of code or words through them once and expect a flawless result is simply illogical. I firmly believe that any effective system should incorporate a robust user interaction component, regardless of the specific task or problem at hand.
- FishInTheWater 3y ago

School-Cotton 3y ago

“Engineer” originally just meant someone who builds engines (in a broad sense of that word). The formal titles requiring certification, etc. are the more recent development.

ris58h 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineer > The word engineer (Latin ingeniator) is derived from the Latin words ingeniare ("to contrive, devise") and ingenium ("cleverness").

larodi 3y ago

you make a valid point, and no - we are not engineers. we are people with printed labels at best, where the label says architect or engineer. but most of these people with these labels don't even have a degree, which is the prerequisite to have this designations. architects also typically need to comply for a local guild. we, the IT crowd, are long over-due for this formalization of the professions.

aiisjustanif 3y ago
I feel like many places have tried this and didn’t like it or molded it into a Frankenstein. The idea of an engineer that researches, designs, tests, and measures and a programmer that implements seemed to cost too much (not just monetarily) for the industry that employees them and there isn’t the sufficient need to regulate all sun-groups of the industries that employ software programmers / engineers.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]