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Simon Willison
@simonwillison.net

The reason I think it's important to spread the message that using modern AI tools is difficult is that I don't want people being embarrassed to ask questions about how to use them - or quietly assuming they "aren't smart enough" and giving up

Simon Willison@simonwillison.net

General consensus in the replies and quotes of this seems to be that the entire concept of "AI skills" is a joke - how hard is typing text into a chatbot, really? I will continue to argue that it's genuinely difficult, and that the challenge in using these tools is widely underestimated

oldest_sql_user
@exodyne.bsky.social

Oh man, I remember Reddit writhing in scorn when the term “prompt engineering” took off. The assumption was that it’s so trivially easy there was no need to overcomplicate it. Fast forward to now, when Anthropic Console will burn 60 seconds optimizing a CoT prompt for you.

Lawrence Jones
@lawrencejones.dev

To be fair, the complaint was you won’t end up with a ‘prompt engineering’ role. Which is true. Engineers are expected to learn how to engineer prompts, you don’t go hiring for someone to do this exclusively.

oldest_sql_user
@exodyne.bsky.social

I've seen the complaint you reference, but I'm talking about stuff like this (mostly from 2+ yrs ago): "I think I get a little more angry every time I see someone say “prompt engineer”. [...] Like holy fuck. You are typing words to an LLM. It’s not complicated and you’re not engineering anything"

Lawrence Jones
@lawrencejones.dev

Ah right, that makes sense. I think the term makes most sense when writing prompts that power products used by others than people personally using chatbots. There is a lot of engineering required for that, it’s very difficult to do right.

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oldest_sql_user
@exodyne.bsky.social

I think that's a useful distinction. I have to think about the prompts for my custom GPTs as tiny programs, but using GPT day to day is mostly just a conversation. I still do mild prompt engineering like "you're a database expert, or "include a <thoughts> tag".