The Plight of the Prompt Engineers

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2023-03-17 20:00:19

The following article was written using Bing Chat powered by GPT-4. It is an editorial about the harsh future awaiting software engineers — now called prompt engineers — following the emergence of generative AIs.

The year is 2030, and programming as we know it has been transformed by artificial intelligence. Gone are the days of writing lines of code by hand, debugging errors, and testing software. Instead, programmers have become prompt engineers, who use natural language to instruct AI systems to generate code for them.

Prompt engineering may sound like a dream job for many aspiring coders. After all, who wouldn’t want to delegate the tedious and complex tasks of coding to a powerful machine that can do it faster and better? But behind this seemingly glamorous profession lies a harsh reality: prompt engineers are overworked, underpaid, and exploited by tech companies that treat them as disposable commodities.

Prompt engineering is not as easy as it sounds. It requires a high level of creativity, logic, and domain knowledge to craft effective prompts that can elicit the desired output from AI systems. Prompt engineers also need to constantly update their skills and learn new languages and frameworks as technology evolves. Moreover, prompt engineering is not immune to errors and bugs; prompt engineers still need to verify and validate the code generated by AI systems, troubleshoot problems, and fix glitches.