this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2024
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[–] [email protected] 108 points 9 months ago (3 children)

What prompt did you use to make this 🤨🤔

[–] [email protected] 39 points 9 months ago

The irony. I bet the guy who prompted that calls himself an artist.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (3 children)

Was going to comment about how there is a stock photo for everything. Fingers seem too good for AI?

Nevermind, that kids right hand... 😅

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

Also: the middle fingers are far too long

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Now look at his eyelids...

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[–] p1mrx 14 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)
[–] [email protected] 85 points 9 months ago (1 children)

That's why I'm proud to be also programming in HTML

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

it's only real programming if you also use CSS

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[–] [email protected] 62 points 9 months ago (3 children)

"prompt engineering"

Sounds made up af

[–] Croquette 20 points 9 months ago (3 children)

The US add engineer to everything to sound most prestigious than they are. If you sell your service as a AI prompt writer, you get paid peanuts. If you sell the same service as AI prompt engineer, the C-Suites cream their pants.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

It is, I believe the correct term is "proompt"

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 9 months ago (3 children)
[–] h3rm17 8 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, well, like most software engineers lol

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago
[–] [email protected] 35 points 9 months ago

“prompt engineering” in itself is such an embarrassing term for the act of saying “computer uhhh show me epic boobies!!”

like that joke about calling dishwashing “submerged porcelain technician” but unironically

[–] [email protected] 35 points 9 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (1 children)

If you look close enough, all pictures are fake.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

Hey, no need to accuse the guy of cutting tvs to get out of honoring the warranty.

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Making middle management do everything is not 'running a business'.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (1 children)

If middle management is doing everything aren't they no longer middle management?

[–] [email protected] 18 points 9 months ago (1 children)

They get middle paychecks.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago

And vetoed on sensible decisions in favour of non-sensible ones that make the upper management larger bonuses.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 9 months ago

It's not engineering either. Or art. It's only barely writing, in an overly literal sense.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago
[–] xmunk 12 points 9 months ago (3 children)

People in glass houses...

Software engineering isn't engineering.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Yes, it is. Mostly because "real engineering" isn't the high bar it's made out to be. From that blog:

Nobody I read in these arguments, not one single person, ever worked as a “real” engineer. At best they had some classical training in the classroom, but we all know that looks nothing like reality. Nobody in this debate had anything more than stereotypes to work with. The difference between the engineering in our heads and in reality has been noticed by others before, most visibly by Glenn Vanderburg. He read books on engineering to figure out the difference. But I wanted to go further.

Software has developed in an area where the cost of failure is relatively low. We might make million dollar mistakes, but it's not likely anybody dies from it. In areas where somebody could die from bad software, techniques like formal verification come into play. Those tend to make everything take 10 times longer, and there's no compelling reason for the industry at large to do that.

If anything, we should lean into this as an advantage. How fast can we make the cycle of change to deployment?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago

I help make Healthcare software. Mistakes can easily lead to death. Not most, but it's something we always have to worry about.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

We might make million dollar mistakes, but it’s not likely anybody dies from it.

I had a coworker who got a gig writing PDA software for a remote-controlled baseball machine. He was to this day the most incompetent programmer I've ever met personally; his biggest mistake on this project was firing a 120 mph knuckleball (a pitch with no spin so its flight path is incredibly erratic) a foot over a 12-year-old kid's head. This was the only time in my 25-year career that I had to physically restrain someone (the client, in this case) to prevent a fist fight. I replaced my coworker on the project after this and you can bet I took testing a little bit more seriously than he did.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I would like to subscribe to your newsletter

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago

In many cases this is accurate. Programming alone doesn't amount to engineering. Lotta low quality lines of code being churned out these days because standards have dropped.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

By how some teams operate, and some developers think, there is certainly cases where the "engineering" aspect is hard to find.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago

But is "prompt hacking" considered actual "hacking?"

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Bro if you could get there just by prompting, it would be.

There are no models good enough to just ask for something to be done and it gets done.

There will be someday though.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Build an entire ecosystem, with multiple frontends, apps, databases, admin portals. It needs to work with my industry. Make it run cheap on the cloud. Also make sure it's pretty.

The prompts are getting so large we may need to make some sort of... Structured language to pipe into.. a device that would.. compile it all...

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I mean it can start much smaller.

Here is access to a jira board. Here are unit tests. Do stuff until it works.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 9 months ago (5 children)

Perfect! We'll just write out the definition of the product completely in Jira, in a specific way, so the application can understand it - tweak until it's perfect, write unit tests around our Jira to make sure those all work - maybe we write a structured way to describe each item aaand we've reinvented programming.

I see where you're going, but I've worked with AI models for the last year in depth, and there's some really cool stuff they can do. However, truly learning about them means learning their hard pitfalls, and LLMs as written would not be able to build an entire application. They can help speed up parts of it, but the more context means more VRAM exponentially, and eventually larger models, and that's just to get code spit out. Not to mention there is nuance in English that's hard to express, that requirements are never perfect, that LLMs can iterate for very long before they run out of VRAM, that they can't do devops or hook into running apps - the list goes on.

AI has been overhyped by business because they're frothing at the mouth to automate everyone away - which is too bad because what it does do well it does great at - with limitations. This is my... 3rd or 4th cycle where business has assumed they can automate away engineers, and each time it just ends up generating new problems that need to be solved. Our jobs will evolve, sure, but we're not going away.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 9 months ago

There are no models good enough to just ask for something to be done and it gets done.

We call those "compilers". There are many of them.

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