Comment by gtaylor

Most countries don't have a notion of a formally licenses physicist either. That doesn't make it right to call astrology physics. And all of the practices around using LLM agents for coding are a lot closer to astrology than they are to astronomy.

I was replying to someone who claimed that getting real productivity gains from this tool requires engineering and needs to be approached as such. It also compared learning to use LLM agents to learning to code in emacs or vim, or learning a programming language - things which are nothing alike to learning to control an inherently stochastic tool that can't even be understood using any of our regular scientific methods.

I think it's relevant when people keep using terms like "prompt engineering" to try and beef up this charade of md files that don't even seem to work consistently.

This is a far far cry from even writing yaml for Github/Gitlab CICD pipelines. Folks keep trying to say "engineering" when every AI thread like this seems to push me more towards "snake oil" as an appropriate term.