I would caution against thinking it's impossible even if it's not something you've personally experienced. Prompt engineering is necessary (but not sufficient) to creating high leverage outcomes from LLMs when solving complex problems.
Without it, the chances of getting to a solution are slim. With it, the chances of getting to 90% of a solution and needing to fine tune the last mile are a lot higher but still not guaranteed. Maybe the phrase "prompt engineering" is bad and it really should be called "prompt crafting" because there is more an element of craft, taste, and judgment than there is durable, repeatable principles which are universally applicable.
You're not talking to managers here, you can use plain english.
> Maybe the phrase "prompt engineering" is bad and it really should be called "prompt crafting" because there is more an element of craft, taste, and judgment than there is durable, repeatable principles which are universally applicable.
Yes, the biggest problem with the phrase is that "engineering" implies a well-defined process with predicable results (think of designing a bridge), and prompting doesn't check either of those boxes.
My goals are outcomes on the key metrics of the business I run (such as opex, funnel pull-through, time to resolution) that translate the human effort and inputs into significantly more output than previous approaches we were using. That particular quotient (amplification of outputs over inputs) is the definition of leverage, and it is plain english. I don't think it's fair to hand-wave a word with a very specific meaning away as "manager speak" because you're unfamiliar with it.
I have been using LLMs very specifically to drive towards those goals, and prompt engineering (or crafting given you dislike the phrase "engineering") is a crucial tool to get to those outcomes. And yes, sometimes that means writing my own code itself to interact with them, template prompts, post process, utilize them in workflows. And so, the more I think about it, the more that I see patterns in how I create prompts (that probably could be automated with the same tools used for content templating) that make it feel somewhere in the middle of engineering and crafting.
My guess is that semantic ambiguity makes a lot of folks uncomfortable. If that's engineering, what isn't engineering, and doesn't it dilute engineering? Yet from the other angle, it's absolutely the case that LLM utilization is absolutely becoming a greater and greater part of how cutting edge companies write code, so much so that the "code" that the humans must put effort and intention into writing is just as much prompts as it is the fine tuned artifact created by running the prompt. If the reality of what actually is "code" is itself evolving, it's hard to imagine anything but that what constitutes software engineering must also itself be evolving in a very fundamental way.
Without it, the chances of getting to a solution are slim. With it, the chances of getting to 90% of a solution and needing to fine tune the last mile are a lot higher but still not guaranteed. Maybe the phrase "prompt engineering" is bad and it really should be called "prompt crafting" because there is more an element of craft, taste, and judgment than there is durable, repeatable principles which are universally applicable.