It helps a lot if you treat LLMs like a computer program instead of a human. It always confuses me when I see shared chats with prompts and interactions that have proper capitalization, punctuation, grammar, etc. I've never had issues getting results I've wanted with much simpler prompts like (looking at my own history here) "python grpc oneof pick field", "mysql group by mmyy of datetime", "python isinstance literal". Basically the same way I would use Google; after all, you just type in "toledo forecast" instead of "What is the weather forecast for the next week in Toledo, Ohio?", don't you?

There's a lot of black magic and voodoo and assumptions that speaking in proper English with a lot of detailed language helps, and maybe it does with some models, but I suspect most of it is a result of (sub)consciously anthropomorphizing the LLM.

▲

kashyapc 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> It helps a lot if you treat LLMs like a computer program instead of a human.

If one treats an LLM like a human, he has a bigger crisis to worry about than punctuation.

> It always confuses me when I see shared chats with prompts and interactions that have proper capitalization, punctuation, grammar, etc

No need for confusion. I'm one of those who does aim to write cleanly, whether I'm talking to a man or machine. English is my third language, by the way. Why the hell do I bother? Because you play like you practice! No ifs, buts, or maybes. You start writing sloppily because you go, "it's just an LLM!" You'll silently be building a bad habit and start doing that with humans.

Pay attention to your instant messaging circles (Slack and its ilk): many people can't resist hitting send without even writing a half-decent sentence. They're too eager to submit their stream of thought fragments. Sometimes I feel second-hand embarrassment for them.

	▲	mjr00 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> Why the hell do I bother? Because you play like you practice! No ifs, buts, or maybes. You start writing sloppily because you go, "it's just an LLM!" You'll silently be building a bad habit and start doing that with humans. IMO: the flaw with this logic is that you're treating "prompting an LLM" as equivalent to "communicating with a human", which it is not. To reuse an example I have in a sibling comment thread, nobody thinks that by typing "cat .log \| grep 'foo'" means you're losing your ability to communicate to humans that you want to search for the word 'foo' in log files. It's just a shorter, easier way of expressing that to a computer. It's also deceptive to say it is practice for human-to-human communication, because LLMs won't give you the feedback that humans would. As a fun English example: I prompted ChatGPT with "I impregnated my wife, what should I expect over the next 9 months?" and got back banal info about hormonal changes and blah blah blah. What I didn't* get back is feedback that the phrasing "I impregnated my wife" sounds extremely weird and if you told a coworker that they'd do a double-take, and maybe tell you that "my wife is pregnant" is how we normally say it in human-to-human communication. ChatGPT doesn't give a shit, though, and just knows how to interpret the tokens to give you the right response. I'll also say that punctuation and capitalization is orthogonal to content. I use proper writing on HN because that's the standard in the community, but I talk to a lot of very smart people and we communicate with virtually no caps/punctuation. The usage of proper capitalization and punctuation is more a function of the medium than how well you can communicate.

▲

Arainach 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> It always confuses me when I see shared chats with prompts and interactions that have proper capitalization, punctuation, grammar, etc.

I've tried and fail to write this in a way that won't come across as snobbish but it is not the intent.

It's a matter of standards. Using proper language is how I think. I'm incapable of doing otherwise even out of laziness. Pressing the shift key and the space bar to do it right costs me nothing. It's akin to shopping carts in parking lots. You won't be arrested or punished for not returning the shopping cart to where it belongs, you still get your groceries (the same results), but it's what you do in a civilized society and when I see someone not doing it that says things to me about who they are as a person.

	▲	logicprog 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		This is exactly it for me as well. I also communicate with LLMs in full sentences because I often find it more difficult to condense my thoughts into grammatically incorrect conglomerations of words than to just write my thoughts out in full, because it's closer to how I think them — usually in something like the mental form of full sentences. Moreover, the slight extra occasional effort needed to structure what I'm trying to express into relatively good grammar — especially proper sentences, clauses and subclauses, using correct conjunctions, etc — often helps me subconsciously clarify and organize my thinking just by the mechanism of generating that grammar at all with barely any added effort on my part. I think also, if you're expressing more complex, specific, and detailed ideas to an LLM, random assortments of keywords often get unwieldy, confusing, and unclear, whereas properly grammatical sentences can hold more "weight," so to speak.
	▲	mjr00 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> It's a matter of standards. [...] when I see someone not doing it that says things to me about who they are as a person. When you're communicating with a person, sure. But the point is this isn't communicating with a person or other sentient being; it's a computer, which I guarantee is not offended by terseness and lack of capitalization. > It's akin to shopping carts in parking lots. No, not returning the shopping cart has a real consequence that negatively impacts a human being who has to do that task for you, same with littering etc. There is no consequence to using terse, non-punctuated, lowercase-only text when using an LLM. To put it another way: do you feel it's disrespectful to type "cat .log \| grep 'foo'" instead of "Dearest computer, would you kindly look at the contents of the files with the .log extension in this directory and find all instances of the word 'foo', please?" (Computer's most likely thoughts: "Doesn't this idiot meatbag know cat is redundant and you can just use grep for this?")

▲

cesarb 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It makes sense if you think of a prompt not as a way of telling the LLM what to do (like you would with a human), but instead as a way of steering its "autocomplete" output towards a different part of the parameter space. For instance, the presence of the word "mysql" should steer it towards outputs related to MySQL (as seen on its training data); it shouldn't matter much whether it's "mysql" or "MYSQL" or "MySQL", since all these alternatives should cluster together and therefore have a similar effect.

▲

skydhash 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Very much this. My guess is that common words like article have very impact as they just occurs too frequently. If the LLM can generate a book, then your prompt should be like the index of that book instead of the abstract.