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Every Way to Get Structured Output from LLMs

(www.boundaryml.com)
169 points constantinum | 1 comments | 18 Jun 24 04:01 UTC | HN request time: 0.204s | source
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mg ◴[18 Jun 24 07:23 UTC] No.40714992[source]▶
The baml config files look a lot like code. For example in baml:

    class Resume {
        name string
        education Education[] @description("Extract in the same order listed")
        skills string[] @description("Only include programming languages")
    }
Could be expressed in Python like this:

    class Resume:
        name: str
        education: List[Education] # Extract in the same order listed
        skills: List[str] # Only include programming languages
Two benefits I see are that it would make the file leaner (because Python is nicely lean) and provide free parsing and syntax highlighting.

Is there a benefit of rolling your own DSL?

replies(3): >>40715066 #>>40715071 #>>40715322 #
1. hellovai ◴[18 Jun 24 07:37 UTC] No.40715066[source]▶
that's a great question, there's three main benefits:

1. seeing the full prompt, even though that python code feels leaner, somehow you need to convert it to a prompt. a library will do that in some way, BAML has a VSCode playground to see the entire prompt + tokenization. If we had to do this off of python/ts, we would run into the halting problem and making the playground would be much much harder.

2. there's a lot of codegen we do for users, to make life easier, e.g. w/o BAML, to now do streaming for the resume, you would have to do something like this:

class PartialResume: name: Optional[str] education: List[PartialEducation] skills: List[str]

and then at some point you need to reparse PartialResume -> Resume, we can codegen all of that for you, and give you autocomplete, type-safety for free.

3. We added a lot of static analysis / jump to definition etc to JINJA (which we use for strings), and that is much easier to navigate than f-strings.

4. Since its code-gen we can support all languages way easier, so prompting techniques in python work the same exact way for the same code in typescript.