Hacker News Reader

Comment by orf | Hacker News Reader

How would not having the source code be present/pre-generated, and thus needing to generate it at runtime, be an example of a decorator having no runtime effects?

View on HN

I had the urge to try this out a while back, here's what I came up with: https://gist.github.com/nkrumm/2b154ea2041511233079222373c83...

The decorator invokes AI completion only the first time the function is run.

edit: I lost interest before I was able to get arguments to work ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yea, that’s cool and very possible, but it’s a runtime effect

OP has to be doing some parsing somewhere, so you just switch to seeking decorators rather than magic comments. It's still before the code reaches the interpreter.

The potential issue I see here is that comments are valid anywhere while decorators may not be, but the parser is hopefully resilient to that. You could see a multi-phase LLM that uses the interpreter to ensure the code runs / works as expected

It literally just adds the code to the file between the comments. There’s nothing more magic than copy+paste and no runtime component.

It’s completely different from a decorator that generates code at runtime? As in, when the code runs?

which comments should be generated?

what if the output has comments?

in my question, there is no need for the decorator to be handled at runtime, the tool that does the LLM stuff has to parse the Python code to know what to generate. It can just key off of decorators rather than comments, or at least this is my question & hypothesis.

I’m not objecting to what you say. The latter part of my comment is simply considering cases where you only want to replace a part of the function (the author have some examples on the project page), where a decorator wouldn’t be flexible enough to support. Of course you can also argue those can be easily rewritten to be function scoped, but that is a design tradeoff you make that author did not (or didn’t want to).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com