The following is a collection of thoughts on recent febrile discussion of “prompt engineering” as a way to communicate intention to models.
My initial intuition here was that the rather excitable proponents of prompt engineering were making a category mistake (in thinking that all intentions could be reduced to language). On deeper consideration I don’t believe that intuition was correct – but nevertheless that “prompt” engineering, or replacement of formal with natural languages in technical contexts, is even less plausible.
By clawing the whole of human cognition into language it cheapens language’s transcendent aesthetic qualities