I think that they're essentially solving the wrong problem.
Imagine that you have git but you don't even have a concept of programming language more complex than assembly. All your commits and git history are pure assembly. Everything is cool, until one day C++20 randomly spawns into existence, and a bunch of guys decide to use it in the company. The issue is, the compiler generates so much assembly, that your existing workflow cannot keep up with it. Your assembly git repo grows into hundreds of gigabytes, with PRs that are pretty much complete rewrites coming every single day and there's no way to review any of that shit.
What Anthropic is doing is redoing git from scratch so that it can handle all that assembly, while the correct thing to do is to commit C++ code into the repo, with deep trust that you'll never hit a bug in the compiler - basically impossible for initial versions of compilers, taken for granted nowadays.
What I'm saying is, Anthropic should create a versioning system for prompts, because they are the true "source code". Given the same prompt and the same sequence of random numbers, LLM will generate exactly the same code, which sounds awfully close to how compilers work. Once in a while put the generated code as a point of reference+ caching and presto.
No one is actually one-shotting new code on top of the existing repo and just checking it in. Even in a simplistic case, it’s multiturn. You give it a prompt, and it writes some code, tries to build it, and it doesn’t work. So then it keeps iterating, and changes some more code until it builds and then does the same thing again until it passes tests. And if you have a complex system, it might do a lot more CI.
The input to this is not just the preexisting code, the prompt you provide, and some random seeds. It’s also the output from every single tool invoked, which means you need to record the state of every single tool and every file that was read, every API that was called. It means that you can’t upgrade Claude. It means that you can’t upgrade the compiler. If you change anything in the state of the world you no longer have replicability.
Aside from all that, I don’t know why you would want this anyway. Storing a bunch of prompts doesn’t seem to actually gain anything even if it worked.
> What I'm saying is, Anthropic should create a versioning system for prompts, because they are the true "source code". Given the same prompt and the same sequence of random numbers, LLM will generate exactly the same code, which sounds awfully close to how compilers work. Once in a while put the generated code as a point of reference+ caching and presto.
Bad analogy, cause this is not how tooling works. Tools beget more tools - there's value in specifying "these are the sets of tools we need to make", but unlocking new capabilities doesn't happen unless you... make the tools. And use them. And keep them stable. And watch them break, or become obsolete, and build on top of that. The world has state and path dependent.
Except they don’t right? They aren’t deterministic. All the hypemaxxers over at twitter keep saying you need a way for the agent to verify the result itself. Would that be another prompt then?
Imagine that you have git but you don't even have a concept of programming language more complex than assembly. All your commits and git history are pure assembly. Everything is cool, until one day C++20 randomly spawns into existence, and a bunch of guys decide to use it in the company. The issue is, the compiler generates so much assembly, that your existing workflow cannot keep up with it. Your assembly git repo grows into hundreds of gigabytes, with PRs that are pretty much complete rewrites coming every single day and there's no way to review any of that shit.
What Anthropic is doing is redoing git from scratch so that it can handle all that assembly, while the correct thing to do is to commit C++ code into the repo, with deep trust that you'll never hit a bug in the compiler - basically impossible for initial versions of compilers, taken for granted nowadays.
What I'm saying is, Anthropic should create a versioning system for prompts, because they are the true "source code". Given the same prompt and the same sequence of random numbers, LLM will generate exactly the same code, which sounds awfully close to how compilers work. Once in a while put the generated code as a point of reference+ caching and presto.