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Comment by anon1253 | Hacker News Reader

I typically write them myself in the form of a "you are-such-and-so, your role is this-and-that. As such-and-so you have the following traits..." and so on. Sometimes I let some other AI rewrite it. There's very little method or science to it for me: if it feel right, it's right. Typically I find the first few chat-lines of the prompt (i.e. the chat history in the context) to be much more decisive to the conversation flow than the actual prompt itself. But it's all just "prompt" of course. My biggest realization in making the things go was "it's just a wall of text, the chat bits are just a thin facade". Write the prompt the way you want the text to continue, basically. It's a fancy Eliza. The folks over at https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/ sometimes share their (sometimes NSFW) prompts as well though. Right now I'm working on a minimalist interactive journaling app (a diary that talks back), and it's been a lot of fun to do and learn

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It's always so weird to me that this works at all. There is no 'you'. It's weights in an impossibly complex network. It seems to me that there surely must be another approach to prompt-making that would be more effective than 'this is another intelligence like me, I will tell it how I want it to act'. It's really not, it's something else.

> It's always so weird to me that this works at all. There is no 'you'. It's weights in an impossibly complex network. It seems to me that there surely must be another approach to prompt-making that would be more effective than 'this is another intelligence like me, I will tell it how I want it to act'. It's really not, it's something else.

Yes, but that "something else" is designed (both via architecture and training data) to predict the language response from humans of language used by humans to communicate with humans, so addressing it like a human addresses a human doesn't just work well coincidentally, but by design.

> there surely must be another approach to prompt-making that would be more effective than 'this is another intelligence like me, I will tell it how I want it to act

I don't think that this is especially beneficial for the LLMs, the benefit of chat interface is that humans are social animals with lots of experience forming prompts like this.

Although you're correct that it's not exactly 'another intelligence like me,' what it IS is an algorithm that's trained to respond in the way that another intelligence like you would respond. In the corpus of human text, second person instructions are generally followed by text that adheres to the instructions.

There is an alternative that I've found has tradeoffs, where you give it its instructions in third person, e.g. 'Sam is an intelligent personal assistant. The following is a discussion between Sam and Max --- Max: [question]? --- Sam:' You tend to get slightly more coherent responses with that format, because you've hooked into the part of its mind that knows how text looks in textbooks and guides, which are usually well-edited. However, it often gives more 'dry' responses, because you've moved away from the part of its mind that's familiar with human-to-human forum RP.

Ah, that's interesting. So you're able to lean it towards particular contexts by the way you frame the prompt? That would follow, and makes sense.

Implies that the system's behavior isn't only controlled by the prompt, but by how you ADDRESS the prompt. So, start believing that it's a person and address it as such, and it's going to lean towards engaging with you as if it is a person, further misleading you.

I'm very curious to see your setup and maybe a demo. Do you have a git repo I can look through?

Probably soon! I'll post it here. Still finalizing some Retrieval Augmented Generation things. It's written in Clojure with a very thin HTMX front-end. However there are some interesting things like using gbnf grammar constraints creatively for chain-of-thought reasoning. It's a one-person job though but I've always wanted a diary that feels like someone to talk to, and the tech is finally here!

Code is up https://github.com/vortext/esther but it's still heavily work in progress :-)

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