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simonwlast Monday at 11:29 PM1 replyview on HN

most of this stuff is pretty obvious if you spend even an hour thinking about the problem

I don't think that's true.

Even if it is true, there's a big difference between "thinking about the problem" and spending months (or even years) iteratively testing out different potential prompting patterns and figuring out which are most effective for a given application.

I was hoping "prompt engineering" would mean that.


Replies

timrlast Monday at 11:37 PM

>I don't think that's true.

OK, well...maybe I should spend my days writing long blogposts about the next ten things that I know I have to implement, then, and I'll be an AI thought-leader too. Certainly more lucrative than actually doing the work.

Because that's literally what's happening -- I find myself implementing (or having implemented) these trendy ideas. I don't think I'm doing anything special. It certainly isn't taking years, and I'm doing it without reading all of these long posts (mostly because it's kind of obvious).

Again, it very much reminds me of the early days of the web, except there's a lot more people who are just hype-beasting every little development. Linus is over there quietly resolving SMP deadlocks, and some influencer just wrote 10,000 words on how databases are faster if you use indexes.