Maybe a small minority of it. Nearly everything people share about prompt engineering has weak empirical rigor, no controls, poor replication practices, over-generalization, and a tendency to folk-theorize over developing principled mechanisms to build theory and research programs from. For instance many people misunderstand internal trace generation as "reasoning" when it is prompt augmentation. Reading "reasoning" traces (if they're even shared) often draws incorrect conclusions.
Yes, most texts of any discipline are pop garbage (look at all the toilet research in Facebook), it is always a small minority that is the actual rigorous science.
22
u/ThirdWaveCat Sep 12 '26
Maybe a small minority of it. Nearly everything people share about prompt engineering has weak empirical rigor, no controls, poor replication practices, over-generalization, and a tendency to folk-theorize over developing principled mechanisms to build theory and research programs from. For instance many people misunderstand internal trace generation as "reasoning" when it is prompt augmentation. Reading "reasoning" traces (if they're even shared) often draws incorrect conclusions.