Sam Falco

Last spring, a friend recommended that I learn prompt engineering for ChatGPT. He said it was going to be bigger and more important than anyone realized. I was skeptical, given the various apocalyptic pronouncements I was seeing in the news. But he’d never steered me wrong before. (He warned me not to trust LastPass long before news came out about their first breach, for example.) I watched a couple of YouTube videos on the subject and played around with the tool. I even signed up for a paid subscription so I could access ChatGPT 4 and its associated features.

My results were hit-or-miss. Asked to help me design a workshop, ChatGPT produced an impressive outline and cited a dozen sources I should use to improve my knowledge of the topic. All the sources checked out as real. Asked the same question on a different topic, it gave me vague information about how a workshop should flow. I experimented with having it help explore character creation for a novel; the result was so cliché that I’d have been embarrassed to use any of it. I decided that Large Language Models were an interesting toy that didn’t live up to the hype, cancelled my OpenAI subscription, and turned my focus to other things.

In October, I noticed that one of my colleagues was doing interesting things with AI. After talking to her about what she was doing, I thought I should investigate the subject. When I asked my friend where I should start, he said, “I told you. Prompt Engineering. I can’t stress enough how important it is.”

Clearly, YouTube videos weren’t going to cut it. I also had tried asking ChatGPT itself about the subject, with similarly mixed results to my earlier experiments. I decided to take a class. I found a three-course specialization on Coursera and dove in. I’m so glad I did. I gained a solid understanding of what LLMs do and an appreciation of how they can enhance human creativity and ingenuity.

Beyond the insights about how LLMs work and what they can be used for, I realized that working with ChatGPT is fun. As far back as Junior High School, when I learned FORTRAN and then BASIC, I’ve enjoyed exploring what I can make a computer do and using them to solve problems. When I got into Scrum and agile coaching, I got away from those roots. Don’t get me wrong—I regret nothing about becoming a Scrum Master and a consultant in the agile space. But I’d forgot how fun it is to ask myself, “What can I make this machine do?”

Now that I’ve finished the specialization, what’s next? I’ll keep learning. There is so much more to know! I’m taking a break from studies through the end of the year, but in January I plan to enroll in a course on Python programming. That will allow me to regain my engineering chops. And, because Python is so useful in working with ChatGPT, I’ll continue to explore the world of generative AI.