Prompting LLMs is not engineering

Posted by Bluestein 7/4/2025

Prompting LLMs is not engineering(dmitriid.com)

104 points | 78 commentspage 2

acedTrex 7/4/2025|

This seems very obvious to literally any one that is half competent at actual engineering.

VirgilShelton 7/4/2025||

It's just a buzz word but sadly it will (And already has) effected real engineers :(

LtWorf 7/4/2025|

I don't think they were good engineers to begin with anyway.

bn-l 7/4/2025||

You won’t get far without engineering if all you can do is prompt.

tibastral2 7/5/2025||

This guy should read Bruno Latour, it would make him understand that engineering and more generally science is also a belief system, based on some way of validating the knowledge that can be (or not) what occidental people call logical. But it's another ethnocentrism. See symetry proof of azandé for more insights

seanhunter 7/5/2025||

If a farmer describes something as “organic” (meaning produced in a certain way without artificial fertilizers etc), a chemist sneers because to them all produce is organic (consisting of carbon compounds). If a chemist calls something a metal, well, to an astrophysicist everything heavier than helium is a metal.

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.

OldfieldFund 7/5/2025|

I'm getting tired of these posts. 3 on the front page in the last 24 hours?

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).

msgodel 7/5/2025||

Coding in general isn't engineering. Software engineering is a relatively boring administrative exercise and unless you just want to maximize your salary you should probably do everything you can to avoid a "software engineering" role.

ChrisArchitect 7/5/2025||

Post from February.

Related, more recent post (today) from the author:

Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44467949

lloydjones 7/4/2025||

This article seems like LinkedIn style controversy-bait, or is written from a place of extreme pedantry.

Evals can come pretty close to getting “deterministic” output from LLMs, and I’d argue that this is reasonably considered engineering.

baal80spam 7/4/2025||

In my org they told us clearly: either we will learn prompt engineering, or they will replace us with people who already know it.

sincerely 7/4/2025|

I think as people get increasingly aware of the nebulous consistency of hosted LLMs, local models will become more valuable

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