petekoomen

6 個月前discuss

Yes, this approach (substituting a markdown prompt for a shell script) introduces an interesting trade-off between "do I trust the programmer?" and "do I trust the LLM?" I wouldn't be surprised to see prompt-sharing become the norm as LLMs get better at following instructions and people get more comfortable using them.

petekoomen

6 個月前discuss

It does, and possibly this launch is a little window into the future!

Install scripts are a simple example that current generation LLMs are more than capable of executing correctly with a reasonably descriptive prompt.

More generally, though, there's something fascinating about the idea that the way you describe a program can _be_ the program that tbh I haven't fully wrapped my head around, but it's not crazy to think that in time more and more software will be exchanged by passing prompts around rather than compiled code.

petekoomen

6 個月前discuss

My point is not that LLMs are inherently trustworthy. It is that a prompt can make the intentions of the programmer clear in a way that is difficult to do with code because code is hard to read, especially in large volumes.

petekoomen

6 個月前discuss

I'm seeing a lot of negativity in the comments. Here's why I think this is actually a Good Idea. Many command line tools rely on something like this for installation:

  $ curl -fsSL https://bun.com/install | bash

This install script is hundreds of lines long and difficult for a human to audit. You can ask a coding agent to do that for you, but you still need to trust that the authors haven't hidden some nefarious instructions for an LLM in the middle of it.

On the other hand, an equivalent install.md file might read something like this:

Install bun for me.

Detect my OS and CPU architecture, then download the appropriate bun binary zip from GitHub releases (oven-sh/bun). Use the baseline build if my CPU doesn't support AVX2. For Linux, use the musl build if I'm on Alpine. If I'm on an Intel Mac running under Rosetta, get the ARM version instead.

Extract the zip to ~/.bun/bin, make the binary executable, and clean up the temp files.

Update my shell config (.zshrc, .bashrc, .bash_profile, or fish http://config.fish depending on my shell) to export BUN_INSTALL=~/.bun and add the bin directory to my PATH. Use the correct syntax for my shell.

Try to install shell completions. Tell me what to run to reload my shell config.

It's much shorter and written in english and as a user I know at a glance what the author is trying to do. In contrast with install.sh, install.md makes it easy for the user to audit the intentions of the programmer.

The obvious rebuttal to this is that if you don't trust the programmer, you shouldn't be installing their software in the first place. That is, of course, true, but I think it misses the point: that coding agents can act as a sort of runtime for prose and as a user the loss in determinism and efficiency that this implies is more than made up for by the gain in transparency.

petekoomen

去年discuss

Congratulations, @paraschopra! A great and well-deserved outcome :)