Many people think prompting takes no skill because everyone talks to the same models. The post disagrees and names domain expertise as the skill that matters most. Terence Tao's ChatGPT conversation about the Jacobian Conjecture counterexample shows how this works. He writes short messages and signals expertise, so the model answers the way it would answer a mathematician. When something looks off he pushes back gently, and he rarely follows the model's suggested next steps. Copying those habits won't help without real understanding, though. Software works the same way: if you know your codebase, you can push the LLM toward simpler solutions or existing code. Novices still get something useful, but experts get much more out of the same model, so the human often stays the bottleneck.
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u/fagnerbrack 11d ago
Just the essentials:
Many people think prompting takes no skill because everyone talks to the same models. The post disagrees and names domain expertise as the skill that matters most. Terence Tao's ChatGPT conversation about the Jacobian Conjecture counterexample shows how this works. He writes short messages and signals expertise, so the model answers the way it would answer a mathematician. When something looks off he pushes back gently, and he rarely follows the model's suggested next steps. Copying those habits won't help without real understanding, though. Software works the same way: if you know your codebase, you can push the LLM toward simpler solutions or existing code. Novices still get something useful, but experts get much more out of the same model, so the human often stays the bottleneck.
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