Technology

I don’t think that’s true in the way you appear to mean (sorry if I misunderstood). People who are already experts on the subject matter might be able to use better keywords and discard hallucinatory material quicker, but I don’t believe that you can generically “be good at prompting” outside of an area where you have substantial domain knowledge.

There are ways of phrasing LLM requests that can actively induce them to give you made-up bullshit that confirms your pre-existing assumptions. Which is fine if that's what you want it to produce, but often not what people actually want. For (possibly poor, given I don't actually use LLMs) example "give me the transcripts for five court cases for assault with a deadly fish" would likely result in five-ish almost-certainly made-up court transcripts. Someone who knows what they're doing could phrase the prompt to be more likely to say that no such cases exist (assuming no such cases actually exist) instead of just hallucinating them as per the request.

And you might be right about domain knowledge being required for good prompting. But it's possible to have domain knowledge and still be terrible at asking for what you actually want it to produce.

not to mention that they’re an “intern” who actually costs the same in computing power as two senior engineers’ salary.

Don't expect me to defend the moronic economic decisions of companies that have jumped on this stupid band-wagon without regard for the actual value (or lack thereof) to their business.