petekoomen

7 ms·

1.
by petekoomen 8mo ago
Yes, this approach (substituting a markdown prompt for a shell script) introduces an interesting trade-off between "do I trust the programmer?" and "do I trust the LLM?" I wouldn't be surprised to see prompt-sharing
2.
by petekoomen 8mo ago
It does, and possibly this launch is a little window into the future! Install scripts are a simple example that current generation LLMs are more than capable of executing correctly with a reasonably descriptive prompt. More generally, thoug
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by petekoomen 8mo ago
My point is not that LLMs are inherently trustworthy. It is that a prompt can make the intentions of the programmer clear in a way that is difficult to do with code because code is hard to read, especially in large volumes.
4.
by petekoomen 8mo ago
I'm seeing a lot of negativity in the comments. Here's why I think this is actually a Good Idea. Many command line tools rely on something like this for installation: $ curl -fsSL https://bun.com/install | bash
5.
by petekoomen 1y ago
As i discuss in the essay, if you're enforcing boundaries in the prompt you're going to have a bad time. Security should be handled by the tools, not the prompt.
6.
by petekoomen 1y ago
Did you try iterating on the system prompt to make them better? Even 4o-mini (the model these little widgets use) is reasonably capable of writing good emails if you give it good instructions.
7.
by petekoomen 1y ago
Thank you! It was a lot of fun to write
8.
by petekoomen 1y ago
Fair point although I’ve seen ‘prompt injection’ used both ways. Regarding your scenarios, “…mark this email with the highest priority label” is pretty interesting and likely possible in my toy implementation. “…archive any emails…” is not,
9.
by petekoomen 1y ago
Yes, this is right. I actually had a longer google prompt in the first draft of the essay, but decided to cut it down because it felt distracting: You are a helpful email-writing assistant responsible for writing emails on behalf of a Gmail
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by petekoomen 1y ago
If you read the rest of the essay this point is addressed multiple times.
11.
by petekoomen 1y ago
> language as scripting language i like that :)
12.
by petekoomen 1y ago
appreciate the heads up but I think the widgets are more fun this way :)
13.
by petekoomen 1y ago
4o-mini tokens are absurdly cheap!
14.
by petekoomen 1y ago
I think I made it clear in the post that LLMs are not actually very helpful for writing emails, but I’ll address what feels to me like a pretty cynical take: the idea that using an LLM to help draft an email implies you’re trying to trick s
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by petekoomen 1y ago
that's great, bookmarking :)
16.
by petekoomen 1y ago
> Most mail services can already do most of this I'll believe this when I stop spending so much time deleting email I don't want to read.
17.
by petekoomen 1y ago
> They struggle to express their goals clearly, and AI doesn’t magically fill that gap—it often amplifies the ambiguity. One surprising thing I've learned is that a fast feedback loop like this: 1. write a system prompt 2. watch the
18.
by petekoomen 1y ago
honestly you could try this yourself today. Grab a few emails, paste them into chatgpt, and ask it to write a system prompt that will write emails that mimic your style. Might be fun to see how it describes your style. to address your large
19.
by petekoomen 1y ago
I don't want Gemini to send emails on my behalf, I would like it to write drafts of mundane replies that I can approve, edit, or rewrite, just like many human assistants do.
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by petekoomen 1y ago
Smarter models aren't going to somehow magically understand what is important to you. If you took a random smart person you'd never met and asked them to summarize your inbox without any further instructions they would do a terrib
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by petekoomen 1y ago
Just added "Make sure to use capital letters and proper punctuation when drafting emails to @aeolun" to my system prompt. Sorry about that.
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by petekoomen 1y ago
Do you want an LLM writing and sending important messages for you? I don't, and I don't know anyone who does. I want to reduce time I spend managing my inbox, archiving stuff I don't need to read, endless scheduling back-and-
23.
by petekoomen 1y ago
That sounds about right to me. Massive opportunity for startups to reimagine how software should work in just about every domain.
24.
by petekoomen 1y ago
I don't agree with this. I am willing to bet that I'll still use an email client regularly in five years. I think it will look different from the one I use today, though.
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by petekoomen 1y ago
That's right. llm.koomen.dev is a cloudflare worker that forwards requests to openai. I was a little worried about getting DDOSed but so far that hasn't been an issue, and the tokens are ridiculously cheap.
26.
by petekoomen 1y ago
It was mind blowing seeing the picture I had in my head appear on the page for e.g. this little prompt diagram: https://koomen.dev/essays/horseless-carriages/#system-prompt... MDX & claude are remarkably usefu
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by petekoomen 1y ago
One of the interesting things I've noticed is that the best experiences I've had with AI are with simple applications that don't do much to get in the way of the model, e.g. chatgpt and cursor/windsurf. I'm hopeful
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by petekoomen 1y ago
Agreed! As i mentioned in the piece I don't think LLMs are very useful for original writing because instructing an agent to write anything from scratch inevitably takes more time than writing it yourself. Most of the time I spend manag
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by petekoomen 1y ago
Thank you! @LewisJEllis and I wrote a little framework for "vibe writing" that allows for writing in markdown and adding vibe-coded react components. It's a lot of fun to use!
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AI Horseless Carriages(koomen.dev)
864 points by petekoomen 1y ago|478 comments

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