logoalt Hacker News

brooksttoday at 12:38 PM1 replyview on HN

I’ve had good luck with LLMs and ad hoc DSLs, as well as much less common DSLs like liquidsoap’s stream management DSL.

I don’t think there’s magic in DSLs, I just think LLMs respond well to clear, simple structure.

Compilation / execution is often true, but not necessary. DSLs can be entirely declarative and used just for gating the stages of a multi-step workflow with checkpoints that have more structure than natural language.


Replies

codegladiatortoday at 12:57 PM

> less common DSLs like liquidsoap’s stream management DSL

seems to be on github since 2008 so definitely in the training data. i am not talking about less or more common. either "your dsl" would need to look something like someone elses dsl (at this point is it your dsl?) or you need some way to get your dsls examples in the training data for the llm, or feed it in the prompt.

> LLMs respond well to clear, simple structure

and what a "clear simple structure" for a dsl is also quite not mentioned. clear and simple would be quite subjective based on the domain, the article says let the llm go in a loop trying to figure out the dsl for you.

> checkpoints that have more structure than natural language

if llm is at any point in the structured generation part then either you have a deterministic validator/compiler or you are back to reading/reviewing it manually, what can you trust ?

show 3 replies