Is The End of Prompt Engineering Here?

Techies know well that coaxing a large language model to give you a good answer can feel a bit like tricking a toddler. Developers have been known to write, “if you don’t give me the correct answer, I will be fired” in their prompts—successfully. 

That led to “prompt engineering,” a side hustle for techies who wanted to make easy money by writing and improving prompts for LLMs. Now, a host of open-source projects and startups have emerged to help developers automatically optimize their LLM prompts using—you guessed it—other LLMs to write and experiment with those prompts.

The common thread between these prompt optimization systems is: if engineers can come up with a scoring system to evaluate the outputs of LLMs, then they can also use AI to experiment with different prompts to maximize those scores.