> Prompt engineering is like a shittier verson of writing a VBA app inside Excel or Access.

Sure, if you could use VBA to read a patient's current complaint, vitals, and medical history, look up all the relevant research on Google Scholar, and then output a recommended course of treatment.

I can use VBA to do that.

  Public Sub RecommendedTreatment()
    ' read patient complaint, vitals, and medical history
    Set complaint = Range("B3").Value
    Set vitals = Range("B4").Value
    Set history = Range("B5").Value

    ' research appropriate treatments
    ActiveSheet.QueryTables.Add("URL;https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=hygiene+drug", Range("Z1")).Refresh

    ' the patient requires mouse bites to live
    Range("B5").Value = "mouse bites"
  End Sub

"But wizzwizz4," I hear you cry, "this is not a good course of treatment! Ignoring all inputs and prescribing mouse bites is a strategy that will kill more patients than it cures!" And you're right to raise this issue! However, if we start demanding any level of rigour – for the outputs to meet some threshold for usefulness –, ChatGPT stops looking quite so a priori promising as a solution.

So, to the AI sceptics, I say: have you tried my VBA program? If you haven't tested it on actual patients, how do you know it doesn't work? Don't allow your prejudice to stand in the way of progress: prescribe more mouse bites!

That instantly kills the patient -- "But you asked me to remove his pain"

You're absolutely right! I did--in fact--fail to consider the obvious negative consequences of killing the patient to remove his pain. I am truly horrified about this mistake. Let's try again, and this time I will make sure to avoid intentionally causing the patient's death.

Oops--you're absolutely right! I did--in fact--fail to remember not to kill the patient after you expressly told me not to.

You mean make up relevant sounding research on google scholar?

Don’t do this.

You absolutely can use VBA to invent this information out of nothing just like AI does half the fucking time

The difference between prompting a coding agent and VBA is that with VBA you have to write and test and iterate on the code yourself.