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Comments on Are AI prompt engineering questions on topic?
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Are AI prompt engineering questions on topic?
Recently, AI models like ChatGPT have shown themselves capable of generating content and even source code. Just like with human helpers, clear and precise communication is key (especially when asking for big tasks) to avoid being misunderstood and receiving a response different from what was desired.
Notably, AI models tend to be quite a bit more stereotypical in how they interpret prompts.
Seems like "power users" of AI settled on "prompt engineering" as the term. This next one does not appear to be commonly stated, but to me, a generative AI model like ChatGPT is a very high level programming languages (which resembles natural language) where prompts are the source code.
Therefore, can we have questions about improving or debugging AI prompts on the site?
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No. Software Development is about writing software. Yes, you can stretch almost anything that is an input to software to be "writing software". But arguably the closest analogue in actual Software Development to "AI Prompt Engineering" would be unit tests. A unit test basically says:
- I am writing or rewriting software
- In order to make sure it produces the expected, consistent, results for users, I will create a special set of inputs/configuration parameters/runtime commands and look at the results.
- The results of a unit test should always be the same, unless the functionality of the software changes. For example, there are many different sort routines you could use to sort a list of numbers, and all of them will, if properly implemented, produce the same result, so you can often rewrite your sorting code to run faster without changing the output.
Whether or not an AI will produce the same results consistently with the same input is beyond my skill level. But I would argue that except for someone writing an AI system who wanted to design various prompts for use as unit tests (or perhaps other testing within the development environment), there is no place for those types of questions here.
On the other hand, as I understand the Power Users community, AI prompt engineering questions should be on-topic there.
As for considering ChatGPT (or similar) as an actual programming language. Maybe. But it is quite a bit of a stretch. There are many applications which indeed have substantive systems inside them that can be used as a programming language - e.g., Microsoft Excel, vim. However, at least at the access level that most people have, ChatGPT is more like a search engine - throw something in and see what comes out.
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