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Why is this called prompt engineering not prompt something else? I feel like the word engineering is being abused
by 3xnl 3y ago
Why is this called prompt engineering not prompt something else? I feel like the word engineering is being abused
- iwontberude 3y agoI think if you were more into sales engineering it would all just make sense.
- minimaxir 3y agoThe metaphor is more based on social engineering.
- verdverm 3y agoHaving to iterate on the prompt to get good, consistent results on a variety of inputs definitely feels like an engineering task
- 3xnl 3y agoNot really. Though I know these days people use Engineer for all sorts of things
- notatoad 3y agothis could be wrong and i've missed some of the timeline, but from what i've seen "prompt engineering" started out as a sarcastic joke on twitter about how software engineering roles were going to be reduced to prompt engineering. and then people took the term and started using it seriously.
- 3xnl 3y agoThis can explain it. There is no other reason why one would consider that engineering
- hmage 3y agoYou're essentially programming using English. Anything that isn't mentioned explicitly - the model will have a tendency to misinterpret. Being extremely exact is very similar to software engineering when coding for CPU's.
- 3xnl 3y agoI don't think so. It still remains that you are asking a question?
- hmage 3y ago1. The text is _engineered_ to evoke a specific response. 2. LLM's can do more than answer questions. 3. Question answering usually doesn't need any prompt engineering, since you're essentially asking an opinion where any answer is valid (different characters will say different things to same question, and that's valid). 4. LLM's aren't humans, so it misses nuance a lot and hallucinates facts confidently, even GPT4, so you need to handhold it with "X is okay, Y is not, Z needs to be step by step", etc. I want, for example, to make it write an excerpt from a fictional book, but it gets a lot of things wrong, so I add more and more specifics into my prompt. It doesn't want to swear, for example - I engineer the prompt so that it thinks it's okay to do so, etc. "Engineer" is a verb here, not a noun. It's perfectly valid to say "Prompt Engineering", since this is the same word used in 'The X was engineered to do Y' sentence. Anthropic also have their prompt engineering documentation - https://docs.anthropic.com/claude/docs/constructing-a-prompt https://docs.anthropic.com/claude/docs/constructing-a-prompt - this article gives examples of bad and good prompts.
- 3xnl 3y ago>The text is _engineered_ to evoke a specific response. My grandma can say she engineered Google search to give search results from her location. > "Engineer" is a verb here, not a noun. It's perfectly valid to say "Prompt Engineering", since this is the same word used in 'The X was engineered to do Y' sentence. > You guys are just looking for ways to make people feel like they are doing something big in prompting AI models for whatever tasks, even with custom instructions etc I know the word Engineer can be used in various ways, "John engineered his way to premiership", "The way she engineered that deal" etc, if it's the way it's being used here fine then. There is a reason why graphic designers have never called themselves graphic engineers > Anthropic also have their prompt engineering documentation - https://docs.anthropic.com/claude/docs/constructing-a-prompt https://docs.anthropic.com/claude/docs/constructing-a-prompt - this article gives examples of bad and good prompts. This just means that the phrase is already out there. Nothing more.
- Sverigevader 3y agoI would have preferred prompt crafting.
- m12k 3y agoEngineering is the cumbersome real world tweaking and trial-and-error that engineers do after they take over from the scientists, in the hopes of finding techniques that will let them produce something robust and useful in the real world. Seems to fit the reality pretty well here, to be honest.
- 3xnl 3y ago> the cumbersome real world tweaking and trial-and-error There are very many fields and activities that do just that but are not called Engineering. If we go by that, Excel users should also be referred to as Excel Engineers,
- Art9681 3y agoLanguage is not mathematics and constantly evolves. All you need to do is look up the etymology of the word to understand why your dissaproval is ultimately a waste of effort. The one thing that has remained consistent since the word's inception is that it is associated with operating or implementing machinery or technology in general.
- 3xnl 3y agoReading a three page document to understand how to format questions for model should not lead it to be referred to as Engineering > Language is not mathematics and constantly evolves. All you need to do is look up the etymology of the word to understand why your dissaproval is ultimately a waste of effort. I have noticed from replies that term is already enjoyed by all stakeholders, so I have no energy, time or interest to show my worthless disapproval anywhere else. You should though look up how it came to be referred to as prompt engineering. You will be surprised
- sdfsdflkss 3y ago> Engineering is the cumbersome real world tweaking and trial-and-error That's not the only a part engneering. Engineering is finding a model that can acurately predict the dynamics of a system similar to yours, using that model to make predictions about your specific system and then building and testing that system. This is then done iteratively (i.e trail and error). Just tweaking a system without a model of how it works is not engineering, it's tinkering.
- darkteflon 3y agoAt work we’ve taken to calling it “context composition”, which for us has been a much more useful way to think about what it is we’re actually doing.
- mlrtime 3y ago> I feel like the word engineering is being abused reply Well yeah, this has been happening for a long time. As someone with a Electrical and Computer Engineering degree it used to bother me. Now I joke that the only real engineers are operating locomotives.