Bryan Kerr
354 posts
@BryanKerrEdTech
Helping teachers and parents find easier and more meaningful uses of technology for student learning.
I packaged up the "autoresearch" project into a new self-contained minimal repo if people would like to play over the weekend. It's basically nanochat LLM training core stripped down to a single-GPU, one file version of ~630 lines of code, then: - the human iterates on the prompt (.md) - the AI agent iterates on the training code (.py) The goal is to engineer your agents to make the fastest research progress indefinitely and without any of your own involvement. In the image, every dot is a complete LLM training run that lasts exactly 5 minutes. The agent works in an autonomous loop on a git feature branch and accumulates git commits to the training script as it finds better settings (of lower validation loss by the end) of the neural network architecture, the optimizer, all the hyperparameters, etc. You can imagine comparing the research progress of different prompts, different agents, etc. github.com/karpathy/autor… Part code, part sci-fi, and a pinch of psychosis :)
+1 for "context engineering" over "prompt engineering". People associate prompts with short task descriptions you'd give an LLM in your day-to-day use. When in every industrial-strength LLM app, context engineering is the delicate art and science of filling the context window with just the right information for the next step. Science because doing this right involves task descriptions and explanations, few shot examples, RAG, related (possibly multimodal) data, tools, state and history, compacting... Too little or of the wrong form and the LLM doesn't have the right context for optimal performance. Too much or too irrelevant and the LLM costs might go up and performance might come down. Doing this well is highly non-trivial. And art because of the guiding intuition around LLM psychology of people spirits. On top of context engineering itself, an LLM app has to: - break up problems just right into control flows - pack the context windows just right - dispatch calls to LLMs of the right kind and capability - handle generation-verification UIUX flows - a lot more - guardrails, security, evals, parallelism, prefetching, ... So context engineering is just one small piece of an emerging thick layer of non-trivial software that coordinates individual LLM calls (and a lot more) into full LLM apps. The term "ChatGPT wrapper" is tired and really, really wrong.
