Proprietary vs open source models [LWN.net]

Proprietary vs open source models

Posted May 26, 2026 7:32 UTC (Tue) by jepsis (subscriber, #130218)
In reply to: Proprietary vs open source models by gmprice
Parent article: Reviewing kernel patches with LLMs

New LLM models do not inherently require new prompts. Prompts are natural language instructions, and language itself does not change significantly within a few months. The core meaning of a well-written prompt remains the same across model updates. Even language itself is not the key factor, since modern LLMs are multilingual and a few months of English evolution is hardly enough to make old prompts suddenly incomprehensible. Differences between models come from improved instruction-following and reasoning, not from any need to rewrite prompts for each new release.

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Proprietary vs open source models

Posted May 26, 2026 12:32 UTC (Tue) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link] (2 responses)

> Differences between models come from improved instruction-following and reasoning, not from any need to rewrite prompts for each new release.

But that is why you need to rewrite prompts.

For model A, you had to say something stronger like "absolutely do not under any circumstances write X", in order to approach the desired outcome of only writing X when really needed. Because model A isn't good at following instructions.

But then you upgrade to model Y, which is better at following instructions, and now it interprets your existing prompt to _actually_ never do X. Even when it "should".

Proprietary vs open source models

Posted May 26, 2026 13:56 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

These new programming languages are so awesome. The future is bright.

Proprietary vs open source models

Posted May 26, 2026 15:17 UTC (Tue) by gmprice (subscriber, #167884) [Link]

Not only that, having "X" anywhere in the prompt at all can actually cause issues if you don't want "X".

Compaction occurs, summary messes up, "X" was in the prompt but you lose the emphasis on not doing "X", and suddenly it starts doing "X" because X is in the context.