The answer is always something like: "As of today, do a,b,c. But this will be different next week/month".
I like it, we are at the forefront of this technology and years from now we will be telling stories to kids on how it used to be.
Often, either the model itself gets improvements that render past scaffolding redundant, or your clever hacks to squeeze more performance out get obsoleted by official features that do the same thing better.
It leads to the false feeling of progress, because everyone thinks they're busy working at the forefront, when in reality, only a tiny handful of people are are actually innovating.
Everyone else (including me and the person you responded to) is just wasting time relearning new solutions every week to "the problem with current AI" .
It's tiring reading daily/weekly "Advanced new solution to that problem we said was the advanced new solution last month", especially when that solution is almost always a synonym of "prompt engineering", "software engineering" or "prompt engineering with software engineering".
At least for the current iterations that come to mind here, every advanced new solution solves the problem for a subset of problems, and the advanced new solution after that solves it for a subset of the remaining problems.
E.g. if you are tool calling with a fixed set of 10 tools you don't _need_ anything outlined in this blog post (though, you may use it as token count optimization).
It's just the same as in other programming disciplines. Nobody is forcing you to stay up to date with frontend framework trends if you have a minimally interactive frontend where a <form> elements already solves your problem. Similarly, nobody forces you to stay up-to-date with AI trends on a daily basis. There are still plenty of product problems ready to be exploited, that do well enough with state of AI & dumb prompt engineering from a year ago.
haha, don't you worry, they are going to be back to working on ads - inside the chatbots - soon enough
Scenario: I realize that the recommended way to do something with the available tools is inefficient, so I implement it myself in a much more efficient way.
Then, 2-3 months later, new tools come out to make all my work moot.
I guess it's the price of living on the cutting edge.