Define “prompt” [LWN.net]

Define “prompt”

Posted Oct 20, 2025 12:36 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
In reply to: Define “prompt” by ssmith32
Parent article: The FSF considers large language models

> Which is not surprising. They are useful tools, once you know how they work. And a remarkable amout of code is not really doing anything that novel or unique.

In other words, where LLMs are most useful is are twofold:

* A successor to the boilerplate-generating development environment "Wizards" [1]
* Fancy autocomplete.

[1] Referring to interactive prompt-guided templating engines popularized by Microsoft in Visual<whatever> development environments in the early 90s.

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Define “prompt”

Posted Oct 22, 2025 17:25 UTC (Wed) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (1 responses)

That seems about right, I might also add that very simple usage of existing comprehensive frameworks seems like something LLMs should be able to cough up, like boilerplate describing how to make a simple CRUD app should have plenty of examples in the training data, so telling it what field names you want it should be possible to spit out a Django app, but I haven't tested that theory as I haven't touched LLMs, not even once. Maybe a freeform text frontend to ffmpeg invocations ;-)

Define “prompt”

Posted Oct 23, 2025 7:32 UTC (Thu) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link]

If you just want a CRUD app auto-generated LLMs seem like overkill, it is probably easy to do that with a regular template engine, possibly even with the simple ones in project template tools (e.g. cargo-generate, not sure about a Python equivalent)