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markab21today at 3:53 PM1 replyview on HN

I think the entire premise that the prompting is the surface area for optimizing the application is fundamentally the wrong framing, in the same way that in 1998 better cpam will save CGI. It's solving the wrong problems now, and the limitations in context and model intelligence require a tool like Dspy.

The only thing I'd grab dspy for at this point is to automate the edges of the agentic pipeline that could be improved with RL patterns. But if that is true, you're really shorting yourself by giving your domain DSPY. You should be building your own RL learning loops.

My experience: If you find yourself reaching for a tool like Dspy, you might be sitting on a scenario where reinforcement learning approaches would help even further up the stack than your prompts, and you're probably missing where the real optimization win is. (Think bigger)


Replies

sbpaynetoday at 3:54 PM

Yeah, I find it hard to recommend Dspy. At the same time, I can't escape the observation that many companies are re-implementing a lot of parts of it. So I think it's important to at least learn from what Dspy is :)