All instructions are vague unless its code. But you can also give llm "code" and expect vague outcomes if you ask it to emulate what the runtime would look like.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49519071

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I see a bunch here on awesome-iroh page

https://github.com/n0-computer/awesome-iroh

like if someone says "is this car reliable", i dont expect an infallible car. but if the cars third gear is 'you know sometimes it doesnt work', i wouldnt take that car out of city.

if dsl gets large, the number of potential interactions your dsl allow will grow exponentially (unless you are building an one dimensional action layer). and there will be semantic issues unless your dsl is "clear and intuitive", also comprehensive enough to accomodate your ongoing changes, else every change is now 2 changes.

so you now you need a comprehensive manual for your agent which needs to be sent in every /completion request.

semantics are defined by the converter/compiler/interpreter, and that is the process which is going to consume the said json/yaml. if the json/yaml is going to be consumed by any process then the semantics are inherently defined, so by your definition all jsons/yamls are in their own a "language" (or they are not being consumed at all), which just defeats the purpose of calling it a language at that point.

you are probably talking of some coding harness which looked up the existing code base and then made it and not something like first prompt to llm "write xyz testcase in my systems company dsl in tcl from early 2000".

> LLMs can write it fine

sure, coding by examples is fine (it goes back to "system prompt describing the language"). but the claim we are arguing is reliability. did the llm generate 100% test case or code after reading your existing codebase, likely not as you mention it "almost acceptably on first sight".

i would probably be in denial if was suggesting llms not good at finding and fitting patterns.

i disagree on the semantics of "DSL" vs "config in json". these are different.

and anyways both of them just pretend to be "reliable" by throwing the responsibility to an upper layer of validator/compiler/interpreter

> it is worse because the tooling around it won't be as good

plantuml is good because of the the tooling around it. not sure if we are agreeing/disagreeing there, confused by the wording

> Perfect and deterministic? No, of course not. Just an improvement and mitigation.

exactly, not reliable, as the article tries to portray

it definitely does, and i would say json/yaml is not a dsl. this example of json/yaml keeps coming in the form of "DSL". i would say your configuration is not a dsl, it a declaration. llms are better at declarative stuff ? maybe but there are hardly that many of complex declarative frameworks.

PlantUML is a real dsl. not just declarative yaml.

seems to be on github since 2008 so definitely in the training data. i am not talking about less or more common. either "your dsl" would need to look something like someone elses dsl (at this point is it your dsl?) or you need some way to get your dsls examples in the training data for the llm, or feed it in the prompt.

> LLMs respond well to clear, simple structure

and what a "clear simple structure" for a dsl is also quite not mentioned. clear and simple would be quite subjective based on the domain, the article says let the llm go in a loop trying to figure out the dsl for you.

> checkpoints that have more structure than natural language

if llm is at any point in the structured generation part then either you have a deterministic validator/compiler or you are back to reading/reviewing it manually, what can you trust ?

dsl stays small is doing all the heavy lifting here

the premise is that because of these few existing dsls (like PlantUML mentioned) my "new dsl" will be equally effective. PlantUML has millions of examples in the training data, my new dsls are not (specially if its not json/yaml or just function chain based). as the number of things that can mix and match increase you are basically looking at a whole system prompt just describing the new language.

this brings us to the second part. step 2: after dsl is 'planned' (note they use the java compiler), the dsl need to have a real compiler/executor, not just a validator. because if then you are going to ask the llm to "compile the dsl to implementation" we are back to square 1.

You mean add that to my prompt right ?