Item — HN Reader

  > 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?

3 comments

Given that their README is openly being maintained by an LLM [0], I wouldn't be surprised if most of the site's copy is as well. It would go a long way towards explaining why it feels even more bloated and incoherent than usual.

[0] "This readme is maintained by the readme-updater script." https://github.com/microsoft/genaiscript

I wonder how long it will go before it devolves into complete incoherence. It already seems incoherent so probably in a few updates it will be completely unreadable.

Kafka would be proud. We're gone from the dream of a semantic web to industrial grade non-sense spreading automatically.

It does seem like everything is heading in that direction.

Hi GenAIScript dev here, you'll find the readme at https://github.com/microsoft/genaiscript. Thanks for your feedback!

Thanks for dropping by!

I'm going to be honest, I'm still confused about what I'm looking at.

I tried listening to the NotebookLLM podcast you've embedded, which makes it sound like this is primarily directed at non-programmers (people who want to "run for the hills" when they hear the name GitHub). But then your README looks more targeted at web programmers who want to write TypeScript-like code.

When I get to the rest of the README, I'm unclear what "JavaScript-ish environment" means. Does that mean this is something like AssemblyScript, a subset of TypeScript? If so, why did you decide to do a subset instead of a library?

Addendum:

As I'm going over the README again, trying desperately to make sense of it, I found this:

> This readme is maintained by the readme-updater script.

At least I now understand my confusion.

Can you clarify, are you also an LLM, or are you a human dev? > This readme is maintained by the readme-updater script.

Agree. Using LLMs from code is already so easy I don't see why a developer would need something like this.

In one evening I whipped up a lib for talking to ollama, usings agents, tool use, sandboxed code execution etc. and that was doing it the hardish way, from scratch.

This seems like a decent collection of tools but anyone able to use this could already do the same things with normal JS with not a lot of effort.