> (prompt engineering, harnesses, mixture of experts set ups)

Prompt engineering as a specific skill got blown out of proportion on LinkedIn and podcasts. The core idea that you need to write decent prompts if you want decent output is true, but the idea that it was an expert-level skill that only some people could master was always a lie. Most of it is common sense about having to put your content into the prompt and not expecting the LLM to read your mind.

Harnesses isn’t really a skill you learn. It’s how you get th LLM to interact with something. It’s also not as hard as the LinkedIn posts imply.

Mixture of Experts isn’t a skill you learn at all. It’s a model architecture, not something you do. At most it’s worth understanding if you’re picking models to run on your own hardware but for everything else you don’t even need to think about this phrase.

I think all of this influencer and podcast hype is giving the wrong impression about how hard and complicated LLMs are. The people doing the best with them aren’t studying all of these “skills”, they’re just using the tools and learning what they’re capable of.