I tried it in the past, one time “in earnest.” But when I discovered that none of my actual optimized prompts were extractable, I got cold feet and went a different route. The idea of needing to do fully commit to a framework scares me. The idea of having a computer optimize a prompt as a compilation step makes a lot of sense, but treating the underlying output prompt as an opaque blob doesn’t. Some of my use cases were JUST off of the beaten path that dspy was confusing, which didn’t help. And lastly, I felt like committing to dspy meant that I would be shutting the door on any other framework or tool or prompting approach down the road.

I think I might have just misunderstood how to use it.

I don't know that you misunderstood. This is one of my biggest gripes with Dspy as well. I think it takes the "prompt is a parameter" concept a bit too far.

I highly recommend checking out this community plugin from Maxime, it helps "bridge the gap": https://github.com/dspy-community/dspy-template-adapter