←back to thread

330 points todsacerdoti | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.231s | source
Show context
the__alchemist ◴[] No.46235329[source]
If the community followed the author's guidance, we would have names like "Generic LLM wrapper 690" ("GLW690" if following the early programming language conventions.) or "Github clone with a different ideology 11"
replies(2): >>46235362 #>>46235446 #
lr0 ◴[] No.46235362[source]
Not at all. You don't name by category, you can name by function or approach. PostgreSQL isn't "Generic SQL Database 47" it's the successor to Ingres (Post-Ingres-SQL). If your "LLM wrapper" does nothing distinctive worth naming, maybe don't publish it. But if it specifically handles streaming, call it something like "llm-stream-client." If it focuses on prompt templating, "prompt-template-engine." The name encodes the actual value proposition.

I actually stated this on the post, but let me reiterate, I think that naming things in somehow fun way is totally okay as long as it stays relevant to what the tool actually does (you can have this achieved by play wording suffixes (Mongo"DB", Open"SSL", Ma"git" are good examples, all are better than elephant, dog, and beaver).

replies(2): >>46235525 #>>46235528 #
gipp ◴[] No.46235528[source]
Sure, but how many LLM streaming clients are out there?

Namespacing, sure. But is "We use gh:someguy/openai/llm-streaming-client to talk to the backend" (x50 similarly cumbersome names in any architecture discussion) really better than "We use Pegasus as our LLM streaming client"?

replies(1): >>46235826 #
lr0 ◴[] No.46235826[source]
Nobody says "gh:someguy/openai/llm-streaming-client" in conversation. You say "the streaming client" or "llm-stream" the same way you'd say "Pegasus." But when someone new joins or you're reading code, "llm-stream" is self-documenting. "Pegasus" requires looking it up every single time until you memorize an arbitrary mapping.
replies(3): >>46237532 #>>46238721 #>>46239034 #
1. wredcoll ◴[] No.46238721[source]
I promise you, names are not self documenting. Not in any meaningful way.

This is one of those classic examples where things you've already learned are "obvious and intuitive" and new things are "opaque and indistinct".

We can go back and forth with specific examples all day: cat, ls, grep, etc are all famously inscrutable, power shell tried to name everything with a self-documenting name and the results are impossible to memorize. "llm-stream" tells me absolutely nothing without context and if it had context, pegasus would be equally understandable.