4 ms·

I thought this entire premise was obvious? Does it really take an article and a venn diagram to say you should only provide the relevant content to your LLM whe

I thought this entire premise was obvious? Does it really take an article and a venn diagram to say you should only provide the relevant content to your LLM when asking a question?

simonw 1y ago
"Relevant content to your LLM when asking a question" is last year's RAG. If you look at how sophisticated current LLM systems work there is so much more to this. Just one example: Microsoft open sourced VS Code Copilot Chat today (MIT license). Their prompts are dynamically assembled with tool instructions for various tools based on whether or not they are enabled: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-copilot-chat/blob/v0.29.2025063001/src/extension/prompts/node/agent/agentInstructions.tsx#L54 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-copilot-chat/blob/v0.29.... And the autocomplete stuff has a wealth of contextual information included: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-copilot-chat/blob/v0.29.2025063001/src/extension/xtab/common/promptCrafting.ts#L34 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-copilot-chat/blob/v0.29.... You have access to the following information to help you make informed suggestions: - recently_viewed_code_snippets: These are code snippets that the developer has recently looked at, which might provide context or examples relevant to the current task. They are listed from oldest to newest, with line numbers in the form #| to help you understand the edit diff history. It's possible these are entirely irrelevant to the developer's change. - current_file_content: The content of the file the developer is currently working on, providing the broader context of the code. Line numbers in the form #| are included to help you understand the edit diff history. - edit_diff_history: A record of changes made to the code, helping you understand the evolution of the code and the developer's intentions. These changes are listed from oldest to latest. It's possible a lot of old edit diff history is entirely irrelevant to the developer's change. - area_around_code_to_edit: The context showing the code surrounding the section to be edited. - cursor position marked as ${CURSOR_TAG}: Indicates where the developer's cursor is currently located, which can be crucial for understanding what part of the code they are focusing on.
- mccoyb 1y ago
  That doesn't strike me as sophisticated, it strikes me as obvious to anyone with a little proficiency in computational thinking and a few days of experience with tool-using LLMs. The goal is to design a probability distribution to solve your task by taking a complicated probability distribution and conditioning it, and the more detail you put into thinking about ("how to condition for this?" / "when to condition for that?") the better the output you'll see. (what seems to be meant by "context" is a sequence of these conditioning steps :) )
- timr 1y ago
  I get what you're saying, but the parent is correct -- most of this stuff is pretty obvious if you spend even an hour thinking about the problem. For example, while the specifics of the prompts you're highlighting are unique to Copilot, I've basically implemented the same ideas on a project I've been working on, because it was clear from the limitations of these models that sooner rather than later it was going to be necessary to pick and choose amongst tools. LLM "engineering" is mostly at the same level of technical sophistication that web work was back when we were using CGI with Perl -- "hey guys, what if we make the webserver embed the app server in a subprocess?" "Genius!" I don't mean that in a negative way, necessarily. It's just...seeing these "LLM thought leaders" talk about this stuff in thinkspeak is a bit like getting a Zed Shaw blogpost from 2007, but fluffed up like SICP.
  - simonw 1y ago
    most of this stuff is pretty obvious if you spend even an hour thinking about the problem I don't think that's true. Even if it is true, there's a big difference between "thinking about the problem" and spending months (or even years) iteratively testing out different potential prompting patterns and figuring out which are most effective for a given application. I was hoping "prompt engineering" would mean that.
    - timr 1y ago
      >I don't think that's true. OK, well...maybe I should spend my days writing long blogposts about the next ten things that I know I have to implement, then, and I'll be an AI thought-leader too. Certainly more lucrative than actually doing the work. Because that's literally what's happening -- I find myself implementing (or having implemented) these trendy ideas. I don't think I'm doing anything special. It certainly isn't taking years, and I'm doing it without reading all of these long posts (mostly because it's kind of obvious). Again, it very much reminds me of the early days of the web, except there's a lot more people who are just hype-beasting every little development. Linus is over there quietly resolving SMP deadlocks, and some influencer just wrote 10,000 words on how databases are faster if you use indexes.
alfalfasprout 1y ago
The industry has attracted grifters with lots of "<word of the day> engineering" and fancy diagrams for, frankly, pretty obvious ideas I mean yes, duh, relevant context matters. This is why so much effort was put into things like RAG, vector DBs, prompt synthesis, etc. over the years. LLMs still have pretty abysmal context windows so being efficient matters.

I thought this entire premise was obvious? Does it really take an article and a venn diagram to say you should only provide the relevant content to your LLM when asking a question?

simonw 1y ago

"Relevant content to your LLM when asking a question" is last year's RAG. If you look at how sophisticated current LLM systems work there is so much more to this. Just one example: Microsoft open sourced VS Code Copilot Chat today (MIT license). Their prompts are dynamically assembled with tool instructions for various tools based on whether or not they are enabled: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-copilot-chat/blob/v0.29.2025063001/src/extension/prompts/node/agent/agentInstructions.tsx#L54 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-copilot-chat/blob/v0.29.... And the autocomplete stuff has a wealth of contextual information included: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-copilot-chat/blob/v0.29.2025063001/src/extension/xtab/common/promptCrafting.ts#L34 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-copilot-chat/blob/v0.29.... You have access to the following information to help you make informed suggestions: - recently_viewed_code_snippets: These are code snippets that the developer has recently looked at, which might provide context or examples relevant to the current task. They are listed from oldest to newest, with line numbers in the form #| to help you understand the edit diff history. It's possible these are entirely irrelevant to the developer's change. - current_file_content: The content of the file the developer is currently working on, providing the broader context of the code. Line numbers in the form #| are included to help you understand the edit diff history. - edit_diff_history: A record of changes made to the code, helping you understand the evolution of the code and the developer's intentions. These changes are listed from oldest to latest. It's possible a lot of old edit diff history is entirely irrelevant to the developer's change. - area_around_code_to_edit: The context showing the code surrounding the section to be edited. - cursor position marked as ${CURSOR_TAG}: Indicates where the developer's cursor is currently located, which can be crucial for understanding what part of the code they are focusing on.

mccoyb 1y ago
That doesn't strike me as sophisticated, it strikes me as obvious to anyone with a little proficiency in computational thinking and a few days of experience with tool-using LLMs. The goal is to design a probability distribution to solve your task by taking a complicated probability distribution and conditioning it, and the more detail you put into thinking about ("how to condition for this?" / "when to condition for that?") the better the output you'll see. (what seems to be meant by "context" is a sequence of these conditioning steps :) )
timr 1y ago
I get what you're saying, but the parent is correct -- most of this stuff is pretty obvious if you spend even an hour thinking about the problem. For example, while the specifics of the prompts you're highlighting are unique to Copilot, I've basically implemented the same ideas on a project I've been working on, because it was clear from the limitations of these models that sooner rather than later it was going to be necessary to pick and choose amongst tools. LLM "engineering" is mostly at the same level of technical sophistication that web work was back when we were using CGI with Perl -- "hey guys, what if we make the webserver embed the app server in a subprocess?" "Genius!" I don't mean that in a negative way, necessarily. It's just...seeing these "LLM thought leaders" talk about this stuff in thinkspeak is a bit like getting a Zed Shaw blogpost from 2007, but fluffed up like SICP.
- simonw 1y ago
  most of this stuff is pretty obvious if you spend even an hour thinking about the problem I don't think that's true. Even if it is true, there's a big difference between "thinking about the problem" and spending months (or even years) iteratively testing out different potential prompting patterns and figuring out which are most effective for a given application. I was hoping "prompt engineering" would mean that.
  - timr 1y ago
    >I don't think that's true. OK, well...maybe I should spend my days writing long blogposts about the next ten things that I know I have to implement, then, and I'll be an AI thought-leader too. Certainly more lucrative than actually doing the work. Because that's literally what's happening -- I find myself implementing (or having implemented) these trendy ideas. I don't think I'm doing anything special. It certainly isn't taking years, and I'm doing it without reading all of these long posts (mostly because it's kind of obvious). Again, it very much reminds me of the early days of the web, except there's a lot more people who are just hype-beasting every little development. Linus is over there quietly resolving SMP deadlocks, and some influencer just wrote 10,000 words on how databases are faster if you use indexes.

alfalfasprout 1y ago

The industry has attracted grifters with lots of "<word of the day> engineering" and fancy diagrams for, frankly, pretty obvious ideas I mean yes, duh, relevant context matters. This is why so much effort was put into things like RAG, vector DBs, prompt synthesis, etc. over the years. LLMs still have pretty abysmal context windows so being efficient matters.