sbpayne

So many people complained about using GPT 5.4 in OpenClaw...

But after some tuning, it actually works great?

Agreed! And I hope that we see the principles emerge in many other frameworks to make all our lives a little bit simpler

the bitter lesson comes for us all, unfortunately!

Thank you! Let me know if anything could be more clear, always something I can improve here I'm sure :)

yeah the point I want to get across is less "you should use Dspy" and more "understand Dspy, so you are intentionally implementing the capabilities you need"

Implementations are generally always going to be messy; and still I feel like not all the messiness is incidental. A lot of it is accidental :)

You can see many people saying this in the comments :). I personally think this misses the core of what Dspy "is".

Dspy encourages you to write your code in a way that better enables optimization, yes (and provides direct abstractions for that). But this isn't in a sense unique to Dspy: you can get these same benefits by applying the right patterns.

And they are the patterns I just find people constantly implementing these without realizing it, and think they could benefit from understanding Dspy a bit better to make better implementations :)

I think many people have the same experience! And that's the point I'm trying to make. There are patterns here that are worth adopting, whether or not you're using Dspy :)

I think the reality is that prompt optimization is one of the only "legible benefits" (ie easy to understand why its valuable).

But I think it misses the point of what Dspy "is". It's less that Dspy is about prompt optimization and more that, Dspy encourages you to design your systems in a way that better _enables_ optimization.

You can apply the same principles without Dspy too :)

we have been using Agent Framework. I also have been eyeing LlmTornado. Personally, I find dotnet as a whole hard to implement the kind of abstractions I want to have to make it ergonomic to implement AI stuff.

I've been fiddling around with many prototypes to try to figure out the right way to do this, but it feels challenging; I'm not yet familiar enough with how to do this ergonomically and idiomatically in dotnet haha

I think automatic optimization is valuable, but it's not what Dspy "is"; you can see this consistently through @lateinteraction's tweets.

And hopefully it's clear enough from the post: I'm not necessarily suggesting people use Dspy, just that there are important lessons to take with you, even if you don't use it :)

The "whole product" idea here makes a lot of sense to me. I think this is often a big barrier to adoption for sure!

yeah this is the main point I wanted to get across! I rarely recommend people to use Dspy; but I think Dspy is often so polarizing that people "throw out the baby with the bathwater". They decide not to use Dspy, but also don't learn from the great ideas it has!

This is very true! I could have been more careful/precise in how I worded this. I was really trying to just get across that it's in a sense easier than some tasks that can be much more open ended.

I'll think about how to word this better, thanks for the feedback!

I think in some sense, this is the real thing everyone wants. Everything else is kind of an implementation detail! Would be really curious to see what you're building!

Great feedback! I took for granted that people reading would be familiar with what Dspy is. I'll try to add this in tonight to introduce folks better. Thank you!

To be clear: I don't know that I would recommend using it, exactly. I would just make sure you understand the lessons so you see how it best makes sense to apply to your project :)

I think the core challenge here is that being able to (in "development") quickly change the prompt or other parameters and re-run the system to see how it changes is really valuable for making a tight iteration loop.

It's annoying/difficult in practice if this is strictly in code. I don't think a database is necessarily the way to go, but it's just a common pattern I see. And I really strongly believe this is more of a need for a "development time override" than the primary way to deploy to production, to be clear.

This is definitely a mistake! What contact section are you referring to? The only references to contact I see in this post now are at the end where I linked to my X/LinkedIn profiles but those links look right to me?

I have never heard of this! I took a quick look. I think I'm definitely not in the right audience for a tool like this, as I am more comfortable just writing code. But I think putting a UI over things like this _forces_ the underlying system to be more declarative...

So in practice I imagine you get at a lot of the same ideas / benefits!

I saw this some time ago! I personally have a distaste for external DSLs as I think it generally introduces complexity that I don't think is actually worthwhile, so I skipped over it. Also why I'm very "meh" on BAML.

Yeah, I find it hard to recommend Dspy. At the same time, I can't escape the observation that many companies are re-implementing a lot of parts of it. So I think it's important to at least learn from what Dspy is :)

I personally haven't looked super closely at ADK. But I would love if someone more knowledgeable could do a sort of comparison. I imagine there are a lot of similar/shared ideas!

I think this is an important point! I am actually a big fan of doing what works in the language(s) you're already using.

For example: I don't use Dspy at work! And I'm working in a primarily dotnet stack, so we definitely don't use Dspy... But still, I see the same patterns seeping through that I think are important to understand.

And then there's a question of "how do we implement these patterns idiomatically and ergonomically in our codebase/langugage?"

I think all of these things are table-stakes; yet I see that they are implemented/supported poorly across many companies. All I'm saying is there are some patterns here that are important, and it makes sense to enter into building AI systems understanding them (whether or not you use Dspy) :)

Yes! I have also felt this. I highly recommend taking a look at Maxime's template adapter: https://github.com/dspy-community/dspy-template-adapter

I think it solves some of this friction!

Oh 100%! There are many problems (including this one!) that probably aren't best suited for an LLM. I was just trying to pick a really simple example that most people would follow.

Yeah! I can agree with this. There's some improved ergonomics to get here

hahaha this is true!

Highly recommend following @jxnl on X for consulting / positioning / pricing

This is great feedback! I'll work on an update tonight :)