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ChainForge: An open-source visual programming environment for prompt engineering

Published: 29 October 2023 Publication History

Abstract

Prompt engineering for large language models (LLMs) is a critical to effectively leverage their capabilities. However, due to the inherent stochastic and opaque nature of LLMs, prompt engineering is far from an exact science. Crafting prompts that elicit the desired responses still requires a lot of trial and error to gain a nuanced understanding of a model’s strengths and limitations for one’s specific task context and target application. To support users in sensemaking around the outputs of LLMs, we create ChainForge, an open-source visual programming environment for prompt engineering. ChainForge is publicly available, both on the web (https://chainforge.ai) and as a locally installable Python package hosted on PyPI. We detail some features of ChainForge and how we iterated the design in response to internal and external feedback.

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cover image ACM Conferences
UIST '23 Adjunct: Adjunct Proceedings of the 36th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology
October 2023
424 pages
ISBN:9798400700965
DOI:10.1145/3586182
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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Published: 29 October 2023

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  1. language models
  2. prompt engineering
  3. visual programming

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