Home | Notifications | New Note | Local | Federated | Search | Logout

Note Detail

Reply to @toast@donotsta.re
Blurry Moon@sun@shitposter.world (2026-08-06 16:58:47)
@toast I don't want to sound like "prompt engineer" is a real job but asking questions to an LLM is in fact a skill and can produce wildly different results depending on the quality of the questioning. there is basically probably ten people on Earth that could synthesize concepts from both Fuschia and SEL4 OS and none of them have time to talk to me, but the LLM at all their source code and gave me actionable insight. Sometimes it's wrong, but the gains are way bigger than the downsides. you learn how to mitigate that too.
---Reply---
(eval 'Toast)@toast@donotsta.re (2026-08-06 17:03:30)
@sun I do actually agree with this, my problem is kind of elsewhere. "Prompt engineering" is bs, but *everything* is a skill you can be better or worse at, including prompting.
The problem is that models work disparately, so things that improve semantic alignment in one might not in another (there's some research to suggest that embeddings are transferable spaces, which would imply that you could apply a mechanical transformation to the prompt to get the same result, but we don't have this yet).
On top of that, with most things, as you do the thing more you get better at doing the thing, but because of the sycophancy this is attenuated here: getting better at prompting by prompting more is inefficient.
Then you have all of the neurological issues that are associated with the entire category of technology, where as you get better at prompting (less quickly than at most other things) you also get worse at the actual things you're trying to do, at a greater rate than you improve at the prompting (for instance, persistence is greatly diminished even after 10m of usage, while being a huge predictor for outcomes, to the point that lately one of my focuses has been persistence).
So I do agree that you can be better at using these things, but there's so many attenuating factors to this that it doesn't feel like it would ever be worthwhile, at least to me, even if it was actually free (rather than exploding in costs as they try to burn money less quickly).

---Replies---

Blurry Moon@sun@shitposter.world (2026-08-06 17:06:57)
@toast I am pretty sure you know that people in software also have to get good at prompting clients to get the clear answer too and it is inefficient and annoying and takes away from real work.