alt Hacker News> the premise is that because of these few existing dsls (like PlantUML mentioned) my "new dsl" will be equally effective. PlantUML has millions of examples in the training data, my new dsls are not (*specially if its not json/yaml* or just function chain based)
I can confirm that having a DSL that is json/yaml helps a ton. Kind of like static type checking, it eliminates entire swaths of syntactical errors, allowing the LLM to focus on the semantics.
> because if then you are going to ask the llm to "compile the dsl to implementation" we are back to square 1.
I think this is an edge case; 99% of the time you (and/or the LLM) would have access to the implementor so it wouldn't need to do this.
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> DSL that is json/yaml helps a ton
it definitely does, and i would say json/yaml is not a dsl. this example of json/yaml keeps coming in the form of "DSL". i would say your configuration is not a dsl, it a declaration. llms are better at declarative stuff ? maybe but there are hardly that many of complex declarative frameworks.
PlantUML is a real dsl. not just declarative yaml.
Have you looked into YAMLScript?
> it eliminates entire swaths of syntactical errors, allowing the LLM to focus on the semantics
As I understood it, the idea the article presents is basically the opposite: The LLM is completely clueless about the semantics, but by constraining the language so that semantic errors are syntax errors, we can catch the LLM's bullshit with a simple validation step and make it try again until it produces valid syntax, which limits how wrong it can get the semantics.
It does apply to JSON in a way: An LLM doesn't always produce valid JSON, but it's easy to do a syntax check with a JSON parser and make the LLM try again until the JSON is valid. The JSON might still be semantically wrong on the level of the application domain (have the wrong values), but at least you can be sure that the generated data consists of lists, dictionaries, strings and numbers.