A new tool from Microsoft aims to bridge the gap between application development and prompt engineering. Overtaxed AI developers take note.
One of the problems with building generative AI into your applications is there’s no standard way of managing prompts. Too often, each team that builds AI into their code takes a different approach and manages data in different ways. They’re reinventing the wheel again and again, failing to learn from other teams and other projects.
Building a new AI interaction model for each application and having different ways of storing, using, and updating prompts wastes time. AI developer resources are limited, and experienced developers are stretched across multiple projects. It’s not effective to have to remember how each application works and how they need to structure and test prompts.
Using different AI models adds complexity. A team may be using a large language model (LLM) like Open AI’s GPT, Facebook’s Llama, Anthropic’s Claude, or a custom tool based on an open-source model from Hugging Face. Perhaps they decided to build an application that uses a local small language model, such as Microsoft’s Phi.
What’s needed is a model-agnostic way of working with LLMs that allows us to experiment with them inside our development tools so we can use them without context switching. That’s where the Microsoft-sponsored Prompty project comes in. It’s a Visual Studio Code extension that helps solve many of the issues involved with working with LLMs and other generative AI tools.
Prompty is a very straightforward tool. Its easy-to-understand format takes its cue from familiar configuration languages like YAML. The approach makes sense, as what we’re doing with prompts is configuring a generative AI. A prompt can be thought of as a way of defining the semantic space that the model searches to deliver its answers.
You can find Prompty on GitHub, where it’s an active open-source project. You can contribute code or make requests from the development team. If you prefer to start writing code, Prompty is available in the Visual Studio Code marketplace and integrates with its file system and code editor. Documentation is on the project website, and although a little thin at present, it is more than enough to get you started.