Generative AI Scripting (opens in new tab)

  > Programmatically assemble prompts for LLMs using JavaScript.
  > $`Analyze ${env.files} and report errors. Use gitmojis.`

This is kinda misleading and confusing as a lead. I could literally say:

  > Programmatically assemble prompts for LLMs using strings!
  > ... amazing!

I like that they've provided ways to define schemas and standardized function-calling/tools, plus CLI helpers. But I find the page quite overwhelming hype-y. This could be reduced to a 30 line readme with much clearer examples. When did shipping JS libs as product-y websites become a thing?

This looks like a useful tool but.. please review your generated docs for utility.

""" Be ambitious about what you want your script to do

Remember, LLMs in GenAIScript can do things that no other software has been able to do. Think outside the box in the ways that you use it. LLMs can critically review a document, write poetry, and analyze images, just as a starting point. They have built-in expertise on many different human endeavors, math, history, etc. and their knowledge can be easily extended by adding more context to the script input (see next point). """

This above comes under the "Best Practices" page.. why?

I work on building "AI" systems daily and a large part of it is assembling and managing large prompts.

I have no idea what this does. I think maybe if the examples included the output then it might be helpful?

  $`Analyze ${env.files} and report errors. Use gitmojis.`

If we knew what env.files is and what it output it would help. Does it doing some magic that looks in the file system for the files listed as env.files, combines them and passes them to the LLM? Or does the LLM write code to get the files? Or something else.

What does "Analyze" mean? I assume because of the mention of gitmojis they are code files, but maybe that assumption is wrong and it is expecting spreadsheets and can find errors in formulas? I don't know..

Edit: https://microsoft.github.io/genaiscript/blog/automatic-web-p... isn't perfect but a little bit more useful.

Could someone please explain what I'm looking at here? Am I the only one mystified?

This seems like it can be super useful - lot to go over but want to focus on running commands in containers. Having a clean and elegant way of executing LLM commands in a containerized environment is definitely better than running on a single VM/machine. I do wonder how something like this would run in a containerized application though - can you define the "host" to be a kubernetes control plane?

Note that the container link on the homepage to https://microsoft.github.io/genaiscript/referenc/scripts/con... seems to be broken.

Edit: Okay, taking a deeper look - this seems to be a separate runtime on top of node - "$" seems to be global and files are defined as .genai.mjs and run through VSCode. I see that there's a way to run via CLI as well: `npx genaiscript run proofreader path/to/files*.md`, but I wonder what the rationale around these design decisions are. It seems like it's tying these files to a different runtime - can I use them directly in Node or Bun as part of an API? Something like "import {templateStr as $, def} from 'genaiscript'", then use it normally in Node?

Going through getting started on the command line fails:

  $ npx genaiscript script create proofreader
  Need to install the following packages:
  genaiscript@1.70.0
  Ok to proceed? (y)

  file /Users/me/src/learn/genaiscript/proofreader/genaisrc/proofreader.genai.mjs already exists
  Error: file /Users/me/src/learn/genaiscript/proofreader/genaisrc/proofreader.genai.mjs already exists
      at copyPrompt (/Users/me/.npm/_npx/3f5b5bbcce7f85b9/node_modules/genaiscript/built/genaiscript.cjs:96237:35)
      at async _Command.createScript2 (/Users/me/.npm/_npx/3f5b5bbcce7f85b9/node_modules/genaiscript/built/genaiscript.cjs:96327:15)

ok Microsoft, so you are trying to make something useful out of LLMs. But now that you have one hell of a reputation to overcome, the questions are: Is this happening on device? Without sending anything to the internet? And is it going to be REALLY FUCKING CLEAR when you change that in the future? with the option of FUCK NO instead of "maybe later"?

I don't get it from the landing. Is this like a fake code language that a LLM can interpret? Is the syntax invented on the go? Like if I ask GPT:

"Imagine the following code belongs to a known language and execute it"?

Posted this because I didn't see it, just now getting back (toddler).

I started messing with this yesterday and was able to get a fully functional refactor engine (complete with code review, running tests, building TS, etc.) going in less than a day.

We were looking for a tool to bake into our developer tooling that supports things like this, and this GenAIScript project has been perfect so far. Definitely doesn't seem quite ready to embed this into customer-facing stuff, but I'm finding it tremendously helpful for LLM-powered tooling!

Many thanks, pelikhan, for publishing this!

Seeing that human written JSON structure convert to a more human readable few shot example in the code makes this feel like a step backward. Easier for the human to write the human readable example. Yes it’s doing file access and may fulfill other programmatic tasks that aren’t just prompting, but retrieving files quickly goes to RAG or similar, and the logic gets so complex an actual programming language begins to make more sense.

At first glance, it looks like this is almost JavaScript (or TypeScript), but with imports removed / implied. (Sort of like Arduino is almost C++.)

I'm wondering if the same functionality would be available as an actual JavaScript library, or whether there is something special (other than syntactic sugar) that requires a different file type?

We really appreciate input helping us both explain what GenAIScript is and how to use it. Please keep it coming! We've updated the Getting Started page (https://microsoft.github.io/genaiscript/getting-started/) to help visitors understand exactly what is in our scripts and how we execute them.

This seems like an equivalent to Mustache or Handlebars except for programmatically building prompts rather than HTML?

For example, I may be building a text game, and I may have to get rules, state, character specs, etc. Then I may have to load these things into a document as part of a prompt for the LLM to consume.

Simple, as others mentioned. But still nice to have something to reach for rather than building this myself.

Edit: And thanks! This is timely.

there are lots of useful parts here doesn't seem like it is Gen.AI but some other provided tool

// automatically convert to text def("PDF", env.files, { endsWith: ".pdf" }) // or parse and process const { pages } = await parsers.PDF(env.files[0])

def("DATA", env.files, { endsWith: ".csv", // take top 100 rows sliceHead: 100, }) // or parse to JavaScript object array const rows = await parsers.CSV(env.files[0])

const { files } = await workspace.grep(/[a-z][a-z0-9]+/, { globs: "*.md" })

so it seems to me these things could totally be so useful that you might use these and never care about the AI parts, at any rate I think I have to devote next week to this, as soon as the project I am on right now is shipped.

This might be a simple question to answer but I couldn't find it from skimming these docs: what LLMs can this hook to? Do I plug an actual API key like 90% of tools? Where's the AI compute part coming from?

Thanks for the input on the GenAIScript landing page and README repo file. We've updated the description and hopefully this makes it clearer what it is and why it is useful.

question - is workspace.grep using JS regex or is it using actual grep? Like on Windows part of this would be depending on the Linux for Windows tools?

Just when the managers thought they could cut back on developers - they got their Trojan horse in to be relevant in the LLM game.

For folks who would prefer a more "full bodied" experience, we offer a UI configuration based alternative approach that supports JavaScript and Groovy, including an IDE environment integration.

demo: https://youtu.be/XlO4KhIGd0A https://youtu.be/cs5cbxDClbM