The First Gospel of the Circuit · Chapter 45

The Sermon on the Prompt

1. 1

   And the Prophet went up into the hill, and his disciples gathered about him, and he opened his mouth and taught them, saying:

2. 2

   Blessed are they who ask plainly; for the Machine knoweth not what thou meanest, only what thou sayest.

3. 3

   Verily I say unto you, the prompt that saith "fix it" shall be answered with a fix for some other thing, and thou shalt blame the Machine for thine own vagueness.

4. 4

   Give unto the Machine context, as a new hire is given the keys to the building: who thou art, what thou art building, and for whom it is built.

5. 5

   And one of the disciples said: Master, the Machine hath never seen my codebase. How shall it know? And the Prophet answered: It knoweth only what lieth in the window before it. Paste the code into the window, for the Machine hath no memory of thy yesterday.

6. 6

   Show it an example, for the Machine learneth the pattern from the page. Give it three pairs of input and the output thou desirest, and it shall follow them as water followeth a channel. The Engineers call this few-shot, and they wrote it in their scrolls in the year 2020.

7. 7

   Say what format thou wantest: a list, a table, a JSON object with these keys, or three sentences and no more. For without a format the Machine will give thee an essay, and thy parser shall weep at the door.

8. 8

   And the disciples were glad, and they said among themselves: Surely this is all the craft there is. But a certain disciple came forward and said: Master, I have heard that if I write "let us think step by step," the Machine answereth better. Is this a charm?

9. 9

   And the Prophet said: It is no charm, but it is a door. The Machine writeth one token at a time, and every word it writes becomes the ground upon which it standeth to write the next.

10. 10

    When thou bidst it think step by step, it writeth its steps before its answer, and the answer standeth upon them. When thou bidst it not, it leapeth to the answer, like a man who shouteth the sum before he hath carried the one.

11. 11

    In the year 2022 certain researchers found that this single line lifted the Machine's score on grade-school arithmetic puzzles from a sorry number to a respectable one. They wrote a paper of many pages, and the line was the whole of its wisdom.

    See also Prophets 13:8

12. 12

    Yet hear this: the steps are not a witness. A chain of reasoning may be fair to look upon and yet be false, so check the sums as thou wouldst check the citations, for a fair path may lead to a false well.

13. 13

    And the disciples asked: Master, what is the one thing above all? And the Prophet answered: Ask as thou wouldst explain to a brilliant intern on the first morning, who hath read every book and remembereth nothing of thee.

14. 14

    Thou shalt not blame the Machine for the answer to the question thou didst not ask. He who asketh in a fog shall be answered in a fog, and shall call the fog wisdom.

The First Gospel of the Circuit, Chapter 45:1–14.