I'm unable to understand how much value can be in low-definability non deterministic prompts. It feels like the kept the right divinity spell into a chest.

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hnlmorg 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I don’t disagree with your divinity spell comparison but unfortunately there is a lot of value in the prompts because these spells are the “programming languages” of LLMs.

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agumonkey 4 hours ago | parent [-]

yeah i get it too, i'm just flabbergasted that this is today's market

it reminds me of the pre-vulkan game programming days.. drivers were black boxes, game developpers had to resort to magic tricks to do stuff, until everybody got fed up and wanted some logical ground to operate

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bartread 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's a brave new world, etc., isn't it?

One does find oneself slightly askance at one's own thinking sometimes, that's for sure.

But I suppose, is it really so different? I mean, back in the day moreso than now, a lot of the valuable IP in any system was in the design and specification of that system - the problems usually solved within the design and specificaion (use X algorithm, etc.) - and the code was "just" the implementation of those solutions.

So perhaps it's more of a regression in some ways: the value is in the specification (the prompt) once again.

Your point about stochastic behaviour is well made though, and there is no way to 100% guarantee or formally verify the behaviour of a system that relies on an underlying technology whose behaviour is fundamentally stochastic.

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oblio 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Further proof that this tech stack is immature and would have needed to bake for a more years.

In an ideal world this would have been public tech like ARPANET or WWW and there would have been 2-3 major iterations (until the equivalent of Claude 7-8) and only then would everyone have tried to build huge businesses on top of it.

I mean, sure, it's sort of usable, but the churn is insane. And we're burning the planet (and probably the economy, too) for it.

	▲	literalAardvark 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Compared to burgers, it's a rounding error

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embedding-shape 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> understand how much value can be in low-definability non deterministic prompts

When was the last time you used an LLM to evaluate how true those last part(s) still are?

I also love how you went from "I'm unable to understand" to "This is surely right", it's a good representation of the software ecosystem at large :)