Prompting Is Programming

Kalanos

python instructions are more succinct than english

orthogonal_cube

No. Prompting is Project Management. You’re setting expectations for what you want and waiting to see what the model provides. You may be learning to articulate things well enough for the specific model you’ve chosen to produce the output you want, but it’s not programming. Only when you manipulate the code is it programming.

t-writescode

I’ll buy this. I get a lot more out of the code when I ask it to do things in steps. Though I absolutely still have to go through it robustly to protect against Claudisms, comments only Claude understands, function names that make sense only with maximum context and a dictionary of that same context, etc. and it still overlaps function responsibility. I’m not out of a job yet! Hah.

whateveracct

do prompts fall under curry-howard isomorphism? somehow even less than bash, maybe lol

marcus_holmes

This really resonated with me. My co-founder is a really smart man who cannot get good results out of LLMs. I haven't really gone into it with him in any detail, but his experience is like the academic in TFA; it just doesn't do what he wants it to do. I'll send him the article and see if a crash-course in "this is how programmers think about problems" helps.

proc0

The reason it's not programming is because the AI has several layers of indirection that take ambiguous descriptions and iterates on them in a similar way a human would before writing the code itself. These layers of indirection are not computer specifications. Programming entails specific instructions and a high level of control, a.k.a. specifications. Of course, there are other kinds of specs, like business specs, but here we're talking about specs in the literal sense, where you are being specific of how the machine should work in a predictive sense. We don't do this with prompts, and we expect the AI to do this for us in the same way we expect a human engineer to take ambiguous directions and turn it into the actual computer spec. The fact that domain knowledge makes for better prompts is a shortcoming of AI instead of a feature of prompting.

lawrenceyan

I'd argue prompting is more like the PRD or technical design doc you write as a PM

xyzzy_apps

I think it is more fundamental than that. Every sentence in English is either a function call (action), a database query of sorts, an observation about time/place/people or a logical proposition. Even continuations / process control are a part of natural language. Domain knowledge is basically having an idea about the rules and procedures of the said domain. A glossary of a domain is a library. I find my prompting these days increasingly become more and more imperative and resemble logo somewhat. It is better I suppose from assembling code from blogs, books, github, stack overflow and 20+ google searches.