There is a (non-meme) reason why Prompt Engineer is a real title these days. It takes a measure of skill to get the model to focus on and attempt to solve the right question. This becomes even more apparent if you try to generate a product description where a newb will get something filled with superlative lies and a pro will get something better than most human writers in the field can muster for a much lower cost per text (compared to professional writers, often on par or more expensive than content farms). AI is a great tool, but it's neither the only tool (don't hammer in screws) nor is it perfect. The best approach is to let the AI do the easy boiler plate 80% then add that human touch to the hard 20% and at most have the AI prepare the structure / stubs.

[–] the_sisko@startrek.website 10 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I'm totally willing to accept "the world is changing and new skills are necessary" but at the same time, are a prompt engineer's skills transferrable across subject domains?

It feels to me like "prompt engineering" skills are just skills to compliment the expertise you already have. Like the skill of Google searching. Or learning to use a word processor. These are skills necessary in the world today, but almost nobody's job is exclusively to Google, or use a word processor. In reality, you need to get something done with your tool, and you need to know shit about the domain you're applying that tool to. You can be an excellent prompt engineer, and I guess an LLM will allow you to BS really well, but subject matter experts will see through the BS.

I know I'm not really strongly disagreeing, but I'm just pushing back on the idea of prompt engineer as a job (without any other expertise).

[–] ninjan@lemmy.mildgrim.com 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

We're not talking small organizations here, nor small projects. In those cases it's true that you can't "only" do prompt engineering but where I see it is in larger orgs where you bring into the team the know how about how to prompt efficiently, how to do refinement, where to do variable substitution and how, etc etc. The closest analogy is specific tech skills, like say DBs, for a small firm its just something one backend dude knows decently, at a large firm there are several DBAs and they help teams tackle complex DB questions. Same with say Search, first Solr and nowadays Elastic. Or for that matter Networks, in many cases there might be absolutely no one at the whole firm that knows anything more than the basics because you have another company doing it for you.

[–] the_sisko@startrek.website 2 points 11 months ago

The closest analogy is specific tech skills, like say DBs, for a small firm its just something one backend dude knows decently, at a large firm there are several DBAs and they help teams tackle complex DB questions. Same with say Search, first Solr and nowadays Elastic.

Yeah I mean I guess we're saying the same thing then :)

I don't think prompt engineering could be somebody's only job, just a skill they bring to the job, like the examples you give. In those cases, they'd still need to be a good DBA, or whatever the specific role is. They're a DBA who knows prompt engineering, etc.

[–] Cannacheques@slrpnk.net 0 points 11 months ago

To be fair, in my mind most AI is kind of half baked potential terminator style nightmare fuel for the average person

[–] 0x4E4F@infosec.pub 0 points 11 months ago

To be honest, I just gave up on it regarding code. Now I use it mostly for getting info into one place when I know it's scattered all over the web.