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jfyitoday at 9:35 AM2 repliesview on HN

I disagree, both of those are skills.

Neither are skills that a large portion of users of those services pursue to any meaningful extent, I'll grant you that. They also certainly are not synonymous with the term "soft skills" as I know it. So I think I am on your side of the fence on that part any way.


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js8today at 11:35 AM

I feel like if they were skills under a reasonable definition, you should be able to name an expert in these skills, and how do we know they are an expert.

But I think you can't. It seems to me, instead, one is better at googling/prompting the better they are in a particular domain, but it only applies in that domain. Like knowing a jargon is not a skill, knowing the domain is.

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Forgeties79today at 11:48 AM

It is impossible to duplicate results with an LLM. This strikes me as a serious barrier to calling it a proper skill. If you can’t even somewhat replicate the results you can’t really improve the input consistently. You can’t become “skilled” at it if you can’t even reproduce what you did.

If you enter the same prompt 3 times the results are of pretty significantly different quality. ChatGPT literally has you A/B test for them sometimes. They’re right to call it superstition - it feels like we’re making incantations and hoping for the best a lot of the time.

Prompting LLM’s still feels like a constant game of guess and check. At best you can argue it’s an educated guess. I don’t know about you but I didn’t learn math by guessing and checking, I frequently had to work backwards and review where I went wrong and/or I had the answer given to me with the work shown so I can learn. I can’t do that with a prompt. When I get bad results (which we all frequently do) I just guess what it didn’t like, try again, and pray for a better result.

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