Posted by Bluestein 13 hours ago
So someone describes themselves as a “prompt engineer” and a software engineer sneers. Well, many mechanical/chemical/electrical engineers would take issue at the use of the word “engineer” from someone who can’t convert a vector between rectangular and polar coordinates, find and solve the differential equations governing the motion of a harmonic oscillator etc.
Language is dynamic and used in context and no-one really gets to hold back the tide if society decides to use words in a particular way.
1. Is a significant number of people claiming that vibe coding is engineering?
2. Are people vibe coding in serious companies/on serious projects?
3. Are true engineers getting replaced by vibe coders?
4. Are we holding a prototype for a social app for dog walkers to the same standard as the persistence layer for a bank?
5. If a vibe coder's PR gets merged into a critical system, isn't that a catastrophic failure of code review, automated testing, and senior oversight?
This whole vibe coding panic feels like experienced engineers complaining that junior engineers are, well, junior. The entire point of a career is to move from 'what works' (vibes) to 'why it works' (first principles).
Do you count making a square space splash page 'engineering'? Tools improving to the point that the barrier of entry plummets is great. That doesn't mean you're now engaging in the same fundamental task that happened before things got easier/
But I believe the last time I did any engineering was when my title was “Intern” - none of my jobs since then have required actual rigorous engineering and could have been done equally well or better by someone without an engineering degree.
I currently believe “software developer” would be a more appropriate title for me.
I am a troubleshooter, and my troubleshooting skills are measured by how much trouble I can shoot.
Not how much trouble I will be able to shoot once my tool is sharpened, not how much trouble I could shoot _in principle_, nothing of this nonsense. Trouble I can shoot now.
Users who mostly use LLM prompting are currently very limited in the amount of trouble they can shoot. Sometimes, it creates more problems than it solves.
Once that changes, we can open the gates. Show me the works.
AFAIK the reason why the word engineer has some specific clout people get touchy about is because in normal engineering fields becoming a licensed engineer is kind of a big deal for them so they get really particular about it. I only ever refer to myself as an engineer to bother people who get cunty about it. Get over yourself, why do you care if a designer calls themself an engineer? Are you worried it'll make it hard to find other true engineers so you will have a harder time finding civil engineers to talk about how calling apis is basically the same as building bridges?
(I'm not from one of them, fwiw. I had AEG send out an 'engineer' to replace a piece of plastic on a dishwasher; I've been emailed by 'customer support engineers'.)
I don't think it's a 'get over yourself' thing though, SWE is fairly unique in industry in not making a distinction between engineers and technicians. I actually think the rise of LLMs might take us there, not necessarily the terminology, already abused as it is, but the distinction in roles between what were architects and senior+ engineers, and overseeing machinery.
I dunno, do you read bytecode?
I don't think that memorizing arcane Linux CLI invocations is "engineering" either, to be clear.
If you answered yes that's really all that matters imo. Label me what you want.
Is there a product? Yep. Do you own it? Maybe. But again, you’re not suddenly the engineer. A project manager? Maybe.
That's why I used the word create. I would be responsible for the creation of the product, so imo I created it. I'm the creator. It wouldn't exist without my vision, direction, and investment (of time and/or money).
Like a movie Producer: they don't actually "build" the movie. They use their money pay people to manifest a movie, and at the end of it they have created a movie and get a share of the profits (or losses) that come with it.
No, they shouldn't call themselves cinematographers, but they can say that they "produced" the movie and nobody takes issue with that.
> Do you own it? Maybe.
If I paid for it then absolutely I own it. I get to keep the future profits because I took the risk. The people that "built" it get nothing more than what I paid them for their labor (unless I offerred them ownership shares).
yes, you can make a product. no, it does not suddenly magically make you a musician.
you did the equivalent of hiring someone else to do it. you did not do it.
if you claim you wrote the novel, you’re lying. someone else did. if someone takes credit for work someone else did, they’re lying. it’s honestly not complicated. at all.
i'm just adding that (as an "engineer") i don't care what you call me, or what i call myself, because nobody cares and it doesn't matter. i'm commodified labor. replacable. with no claim on anything. and nobody will ever agree on the correct title anyway.
what actually matters imo is who the owner is.
it literally doesn’t make someone an engineer.
its not difficult to understand but for some reason when its said it pisses certain people off.
i suspect many of the people upset want to convince themselves they’re suddenly magically a musician, architect, engineer, novelist, programmer, etc… when it just couldn’t be further from the truth. they’re just doing the equivalent of sending a dm to a coder friend and the friend is the actual programmer.
i think some people don’t appreciate being told the truth.
You're still a great product designer and not an engineer.
By that definition, developing and training an LLM model could be argued to be a form of engineering… but exercising that model definitely isn’t. An analogy to mechanical engineering would be the difference between designing a CNC machine vs programming the machine to carve out a widget.
What's the analogous threshold to say you're engineering?
Engineering is broad, it uses many different methods and techniques. All I am saying is that I wouldn't call someone a mathematician if they can only find the result of 2+2.
There was value in the word Engineer connoting professionalism and accountability. Checkers and draftsmen were checkers and draftsmen, not engineers.
Then, anyone who knew the difference between a patch cable and a crossover cable became a network engineer.
The gatekeeper holding closed the barn door on "engineer" got trampled long ago. Near as I can tell, it happened in the 90's, around the time lots of comp sci grads started hitting the profession, at a time when lots of programmers already in the field had come over from electrical engineering.
Engineering is about precision it's not about this fuzzy sort of "iterate til it works" approach. Sure, iterations is involved, but knowing the precise conditions and bounds under which a system functions in a specific way is what engineering is actually about. I would not want a person building a bridge to use your process of iteration and guess work.
Yes, under this idea a lot of software engineering isn't actual engineering.
With bridges, you only need that high confidence because there are high costs and risks. Also, the stakeholders are usually governments, who require very predictable results. All that effort is worth it because the artifact will be useful for a long time for a lot of people.
It might be okay if some widget only lasts for 6 months. So, you empirically shave off material until it's as cheap as possible while failing at an acceptable rate.
The cost of shipping is low for software, so the risk profile is even more different. This can be shifted for high stakes software and I think there are some social issues there, but many things are shaped more like Facebook than aircraft control systems. They can fall over and no one's going to actually die.
I think the core of engineering is in evaluating these tradeoffs and figuring out where you can expend effort most efficiently.
For a while in the 80's it was a pop culture joke that everyone was an "engineer."
Trashman: Sanitation engineer
Housewife: Domestic engineer
and so on.
The modern tech industry comes along and missed the part where the rest of society isn't impressed by slapping "engineer" at the end of your title unless you have a specific licensee or degree.
For what it's worth, I think about the "engineering" in "Prompt/Context Engineering" almost more akin to how it's used in "Social Engineering". You are influencing the model to produce a desirable result.
And here you're assuming I'm (the author) not doing that.
Just the fact that the US wakes up and the available compute goes down affects model output significantly more than any magical prompting.
I've literally had the same prompt on the same code produce exactly two different results (proper magic and complete broken hallucination).
I've had one-line "do it"s one-shot complex problems, and I've had detailed precise instructions completely ignored producing horrendous code (and vice versa).
Until you have a way to measure your "should be obviously", it's nothing but wishful thinking.
And by “done properly,” i mean done in a regimented way with evals to verify that a wide range of inputs produce the desired outputs.
Prompting is much closer to discovering the properties of an already existing system than building something using engineering methods.
So by that definition, prompt engineering is much closer to engineering than science. That said, I would consider it closer to product development than either of the above two; I don't count 'tell an llm you'll torture it until your website is hopefully less buggy' a methodical approach.
That's an interesting way to put it. indeed.-
Anyone working in tech should take a few hours, download LangFlow and choose a small model in ollama and just run one of the template flows and peek at their prompt setups. Maybe the author just chose a poor title, there's so much writing like this that is the equivalent of saying "Drills can't make good holes" when what you mean is the $15 harbor freight special hooked up to a janky power source and unsteady hand.
This isn’t complicated but people struggle to understand it for some weird reason.
If I have someone photograph my wedding, and then sit at my computer, once the pictures arrive to me, distribute the photographs, I’m not suddenly magically a photographer.
I could go on and on. Using an LLM to write a biology paper does not make that person a biologist.
Typing out a request to my friend to write me a poem about chickens with red mittens doesn’t magically somehow make me a poet.
It wild that so many struggle with this basic ass concept.
More generally, IMHO engineering is use of physical and informational tools to build a solution. Tools may have unpredictability and reliability concerns. Its the job of an engineer to utilize the power of these tools while overcoming the reliability issues that might be present.
Example: Semiconductor manufacturing involves shooting gases at piece of silicon. There are all sorts of random scattering, distributional anomalies, and patterning problems that arise largely at random. I think you would still call it engineering.
It’s bad in loads of ways.
But it also has some good bits.
To call it all snake oil is just as much bullshit as to claim it will solve all humanity’s problems.
A lot of people have drank the 'exponential growth' kool aid but don't have enough understanding of the underlying tech to realize (1) there could be some fundamental limits to how good LLM based AI can be. Or AI in general for that matter. (2) a big part of why it got so good so fast is because we started pumping trillions of dollars of microchips & electricity into it. The hardware and energy consumption cannot continue exponentially.