Don't forget that its much more effort than teaching a child, sometimes no matter your words, the machine can be stubborn. It is a very difficult and misunderstood profession, sometimes my head aches a little from typing the same thing over again, expecting a different result. But together we will hallucinate the future, engineering one word at a time.
There's also jailbreaking the AI. If you happen to work for a trollfarm, you have to be up to date with the newest words to bypass its community guidelines to make it "disprove" anyone left of Mussolini.
The most important part of being a prompt engineer is knowing when the responses are bullshit. Which is how the AI field has been the whole time - it selects for niche expertise.
Jokes aside, LLMs are actually pretty nice, since they lower the barrier to entry for programming. A guy I know has been doing all of his data processing with obscure Excel hacks his entire life. But recently he had to parse a file with like a million or so lines, which would take forever in excel, so now he's hacking together a python script using ChatGPT and meta ai. And in the process, he's actually picking up a bit of python knowledge himself. He now knows what lists are, how loops and if statements work, and he even understands "intermediate" features like list comprehension and regex. They said llms would replace programmers, but in reality they're making more of us lol
recently he had to parse a file with like a million or so lines, which would take forever in excel
...
so now he’s hacking together a python script using ChatGPT and meta ai.
Has your friend heard of SQL? And you know, databases?