Design Meeting Notes (2023-11-06)

[DanielRosenwasser]

Python and TypeChat

• Still thinking about Pydantic as a basis.
• pydantic-core specifies the built-in discriminators for validators
• Seems feasible to generate TypeScript from these. Either over JSON schema or directly over data structures.
  • What about custom validators/serializers? Can't handle those with something custom.
• Would be weird to tell users they have to be on a fixed version of Pydantic.
• Anecdotally, have had good results with JSON schema (or more specifically, YAML versions of JSON schema).
  • YAML seems to do really well...
  • As well as TypeScript as a spec language? (check back here)
• What workflow could we have here?
  • Start with a YAML-authored JSON schema.
  • Have a proof-of-concept of using kwalify
• The good part of these schemas is that they can specify more than built-in annotations for types.
• So specify in
• 3 concerns
  • Spec language for language models (succinct, few tokens, familiar to recent LLMs)
  • Validation expressivity (you can say "it's a zip code" or "it's an email address").
  • Developer UX (end-to-end, you have a pleasant authoring language, type-checking, auto-complete, etc.)
• Tied to that are the following:
  • What does a developer write?
  • What does an LLM see?
  • What
• Be aware - there's a distinction for errors committed by an LLM versus errors committed by an end-user.
  • If a user says "my zip code is abcdefg", then that's a user error, not a language model error.
• Another example - TypeChat Programs in Python

  • Top level functions exported.

    def add(x: float, y: float): float
    def sub(x: float, y: float): float
    # ...

• Nothing seems to work as great as TypeScript for LLMs.
  • Lightest on tokens, most familiar.
• Okay, but what's the authoring format? What do you do here? What if you need to generate types on the fly?
• How will we solve the programmatic case in the TypeScript world?
  • We don't have a perfect solution right now. Maybe rely on libraries like Zod?
  • What's that going to have to look like? You say that something is a string, but then it's generated on the fly.
  • How does that get there?
• Do these string unions/enums actually matter? Maybe for discriminated unions, but maybe not for items in a database?
• What are these supposed to look like?
  • It may be best to insert these into comments.
• So what would we do with Python?
• We really really want to see what the accuracy is between the TypeScript and Python forms.
  • If it's not accurate, we need to see if we can convert it into TypeScript.