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Programming without a Programming Language: Challenges and Opportunities for Designing Developer Tools for Prompt Programming

Published: 19 April 2023 Publication History

Abstract

Existing tools for writing prompts for language models (known as “prompt programming”) provide little support to prompt programmers. Consequently, as prompts become more complex with the addition of multiple input/output examples (“few-shot” prompts), they can be hard to read, understand, and edit. In this work, we observe that prompts are often used to solve complex problems, but lack the strict grammar of a traditional programming language. We describe methods for extracting the semantically meaningful structure of natural language prompts (e.g., regions of the prompt representing a preamble or input/output examples) in the absence of a rigid formal grammar, and demonstrate a range of editor features that can leverage this information to assist prompt programmers. Finally, we relate initial feedback from design probe explorations with a set of domain experts and provide insights to help guide the development of future prompt editors.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI EA '23: Extended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2023
    3914 pages
    ISBN:9781450394222
    DOI:10.1145/3544549
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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    Published: 19 April 2023

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    1. language models
    2. prompt programming

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    • (2024)Unfolding Programming: How to Use AI Tools in Introductory Computing CoursesProceedings of the 25th Annual Conference on Information Technology Education10.1145/3686852.3687073(49-55)Online publication date: 10-Oct-2024
    • (2024)CoLadder: Manipulating Code Generation via Multi-Level BlocksProceedings of the 37th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology10.1145/3654777.3676357(1-20)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2024
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    • (2024)Challenges and Opportunities for Responsible PromptingExtended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613905.3636268(1-4)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
    • (2024)Is It AI or Is It Me? Understanding Users’ Prompt Journey with Text-to-Image Generative AI ToolsProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642861(1-13)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
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