3 ms·
A few of these points are right, but a lot of it is so far lost from the reality of LLMs that it isn't even wrong. Yes: structure beats vibes. Primacy/recency
by trjordan 1y ago
A few of these points are right, but a lot of it is so far lost from the reality of LLMs that it isn't even wrong.
Yes: structure beats vibes. Primacy/recency bias is real. Treating prompts as engineering artifacts is empirically helpful.
But:
- “Reads all tokens at once.” Not quite. Decoder LLMs do a parallel prefill over the prompt, then sequential token-by-token decode with causal masks. That nuance is why primacy/recency and KV-cache behavior matter, and why instruction position can swing results.
- Embeddings & “labels.” Embeddings are learned via self-supervised next-token prediction, not from a labeled thesaurus. “Feline ≈ cat” emerges statistically, not by annotation.
- "Structure >> content". Content is what actually matters. “Well-scaffolded wrong spec” will give you confidently wrong output.
- Personas are mostly style. Yes, users like words typed in their style better, but it'll actually hide certain information that a "senior software engineer" might not know.
I don't really get the Big-O analogy thing, either. Models are constantly exposing and shifting how they direct attention, which is exactly the opposite of the durably true nature of algorithmic complexity. Memorizing how current models like their system prompts written is hardly the same thing.
- jimkri 1y agoI agree with your opinion. This statement you called out, “Reads all tokens at once.”, shows the misunderstanding, and then the document header formatting shows/proves the lack of attention used. The headers go from numbered to having just 1 section with a sub-number. Section 3 has 3.1-3.4, and then the next section doesn't follow it. I noticed this when doing large-scale LaTeX documentation builds if you are not explicit about the formatting. The well-scaffolded build falls apart since the token count is too high, and a proper batch process is not in place, or the prompt is vague. "Use clear headings and bullet points" is not precise. Depending on your document type, you need to state all requirements to design with attention.