> It may be illuminating to try to imagine what would have happened if, right from the start our native tongue would have been the only vehicle for the input into and the output from our information processing equipment. My considered guess is that history would, in a sense, have repeated itself, and that computer science would consist mainly of the indeed black art how to bootstrap from there to a sufficiently well-defined formal system.
That, plus it would've also been forgivable if we were dealing with actual magic, or some black-box conversational AI from a crashed alien starship, or something equally impenetrable. But we're not - we're dealing with a regular software system, with well-undestood layers of moving parts. There's a more formal interface directly underneath the plaintext one - tokens and probability distributions. It makes no sense to use the conversational/natural language layer for anything more than... just having a conversation.
> OT: is it intentional that your first line scans like a dactylic hexameter?
Yes.
No, not really. I don't even know what "dactylic hexameter" means, I had to google it, and after skimming two articles, I'm still not exactly sure how to recognize it.
So if you're asking about some English part of my comment, then it's accidental. If you mean the Latin bit, then... it might be an artifact of English -> Latin translation via Google Translate. And/or something about the structure of the original "system_prompt.txt" text. Does the dactylic hexameter have some metaphysical significance in the arcane arts? Maybe when it shows in a "prompt hack", it's not by coincidence.
There are many projects in the works that are having success with writing somewhat formal English language specifications and generating working software.
One of my favorite recent projects is called Parsel:
Parsel: A (De-)compositional Framework for Algorithmic Reasoning with Language Models
All of this is still very rough around the edges, prone to errors of various kinds, and generally not ready for prime time, but anyone is welcome to play around with what is there!
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/E...
The entire field of prompt engineering is doomed from the start. You can't win if the win condition is wasting your time.