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refulgentislast Monday at 11:16 PM2 repliesview on HN

I agree with you, but would echo OP's concern, in a way that makes me feel like a party pooper, but, is open about what I see us all expressing squeamish-ness about.

It is somewhat bothersome to have another buzz phrase. I don't why we are doing this, other than there was a Xeet from the Shopify CEO, QT'd approvingly by Karpathy, then its written up at length, and tied to another set of blog posts.

To wit, it went from "buzzphrase" to "skill that'll probably be useful in 3 years still" over the course of this thread.

Has it even been a week since the original tweet?

There doesn't seem to be a strong foundation here, but due to the reach potential of the names involved, and their insistence on this being a thing while also indicating they're sheepish it is a thing, it will now be a thing.

Smacks of a self-aware version of Jared Friedman's tweet re: watching the invention of "Founder Mode" was like a startup version of the Potsdam Conference. (which sorted out Earth post-WWII. and he was not kidding. I could not even remember the phrase for the life of me. Lasted maybe 3 months?)


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dbreuniglast Monday at 11:59 PM

Sometimes buzzwords turn out to be mirages that disappear in a few weeks, but often they stick around.

I find they takeoff when someone crystallizes something many people are thinking about internally, and don’t realize everyone else is having similar thoughts. In this example, I think the way agent and app builders are wrestling with LLMs is fundamentally different than chatbots users (it’s closer to programming), and this phrase resonates with that crowd.

Here’s an earlier write up on buzzwords: https://www.dbreunig.com/2020/02/28/how-to-build-a-buzzword....

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simonwlast Monday at 11:17 PM

The way I see it we're trying to rebrand because the term "prompt engineering" got redefined to mean "typing prompts full of stupid hacks about things like tipping and dead grandmas into a chatbot".

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