Talking to Transformers
miraos.orgLooking at the transformer as a homoiconic machine makes reading and writing tokens much easier.
In the same time, I can feel how it is affecting my thinking.
Wow.
I have spent thousands of hours driving Claude Code and building a serious and large product.
This post is one of the most underrated things I’ve read on HN in some time.
I agree with everything the author says to do that I’ve tried and I will try all the other stuff. Thanks to the author for this amazing guide.
Those who’ve discovered it here and elsewhere - count yourselves lucky!
Hey thanks for the kind words! I am the author.
Out of curiosity which aspects were you already using and which were the new ones you plan to try?
Lots!
I particularly enjoyed the way you describe the subconscious, martial-arts-like “game” of guiding the model into areas of its latent space you want it to go to with your word selection, metaphors, token-efficient technical terms, and concepts from other domains. Because you know what you want from it, you are in charge, and it follows your guidance, but not directly.
“Tune it by ear like a carburetor” is a wild one, but it resonated - I’ve also used obscure references to get outcomes from models, knowing they will get the connection.
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