HACKER Q&A
📣 58x14

How do you feel about the term “Prompt Engineering?”


Prompt Engineer feels like the new Data Scientist, which had a fairly simple origin (1).

While I'm technical, I don't refer to myself as a software engineer, nor am I ostentatious enough to call myself a social engineer. Many titles are meaningless, but I don't consider the title of engineer as trivial.

There's a Reddit thread (2) from a few years ago where writer Gwern claims to be the origin of the term prompt programing/prompt engineering and has a verbose defense. I think his argument is reasonable and well written, but I'm not sure I'm sold.

I've read several HN threads (3, 4) and I've generally come to the conclusion that you can do engineering without being an engineer, or at least calling yourself one.

What do you think? Would you suggest an alternative?

1. https://qz.com/work/1435689/the-origins-of-the-job-title-data-scientist

2. https://www.reddit.com/r/GPT3/comments/m177n2/the_problem_with_prompt_engineering/

3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25823907

4. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33206677

  👤 beernet Accepted Answer ✓
I think "prompting" is just a temporary crutch on the way to natural language interfaces. In essence, ChatGPT solves a big portion of the prompting problem, and this natural language interaction is, above all, responsible for its wide accessibility and popularity. Technically, you could create a ChatGPT-type system based on GPT-3 but this was limited to experts and not easily scalable. Prompting as an engineering discipline is not here to stay.
👤 janalsncm
I don’t understand the complexity of it, so it’s hard for me to judge. The leaked prompts I’ve seen so far don’t seem that special at all. The engineering went into creating something that anyone can use.

I feel that any engineering endeavor needs to have at least some understanding of the underlying mechanics of what’s going on, but since a lot of obvious prompts “just work” the task isn’t mature enough to deserve any special designation.

👤 mensetmanusman
Adding -engineering to a term to amplify its perceived importance/difficulty/prestige might be unnecessary.

We could probably just call it ‘prompting’ or ‘prompt testing/hacking’ and not lose any of the meaning.

👤 satvikpendem
I don't feel anything about it, really.