Gosh, this story resonates so much with me... I had the exact same experience few days ago, desperately trying to get a small agent prototype working for a quick demo. I spent an good hour dealing with that pile of nonsense. Online payments and accounts management have been mastered for 20 years now, why do we still have to endure such things? It just kills me. The same goes with Azure (and all MS online-related services), if not even worse.
You're talking about a neophyte trying to accomplish an engineering job. So yes, in such case, LLMs dramatically change the game, at least for entry-level tasks. Nowadays, anyone can litteraly pretend to be good/average in any field.
The article relates about actual, experienced engineers trying to get even better. That's a completely different matter.
Great post. The author precisely described what I have been experiencing for the last months of digging deep into that field (with quite a lot of anxiety at first, hearing here and there what a miracle it was). As long as we don't solve context window limitations and self-improving/continuous learning problem, human engineers still have a long way ahead of them.
>> what if we treated prompts as the actual source code?
And they probably will be. Looks like prompts have become the new higher-level coding language, the same way JavaScript is a human-friendly abstraction of an existing programming language (like C), which is already a more accessible way to write assembly itself, and the same goes for the underlying binary code... I guess we eventually reached the final step in the development chain, bridging the gap between hardware instructions and human language.
