From Prompt Engineering to Intent Engineering

I think the number one thing people could do right now to be more effective with AI is switch from Prompt Engineering to Intent Engineering.

This is due to Sutton's Bitter Lesson, which basically says that as AI gets better, our specific step-by-step instructions for how it should do things will become increasingly stupid.

In other words, our thoughts about the smartest way to accomplish a particular thing will get dumber and dumber compared to AI's way of doing it as time goes on.

[ Essentially, we should avoid poisoning AI's native capabilities with our supposedly superior guidance, because it's not actually superior. Bitter Lesson Engineering ]

The early days of Prompt Engineering were unfortunately exactly this: a set of specific steps to do a task. It made sense at the time becau…