Ask HN: Is prompt engineering just snake oil?
Is this just about gatekeeping the word &#x27;engineer&#x27;, so that its purity isn&#x27;t tarnished? I know that software engineers were scoffed at by electrical engineers, who I bet were scoffed at by mechanical engineers, who were probably scoffed at by, you know, people who built siege engines or whatever.<p>Is prompt engineering &#x27;real&#x27; engineering? It seems easy enough to test whether knowledgeable, self-proclaimed prompt engineers can outperform a random person with only moderate experience requesting information from an AI in a reproducible way.<p>If they can&#x27;t, then there is probably no engineering involved in prompt engineering, at least at present.<p>If they can, then it seems like they&#x27;re probably not doing it with magic, so there is some set of reproducible techniques involved. At that point, would it be fair to call it engineering?