home page for Instructor mentions using Marvin for "a more comprehensive solution". When should somebody use Instructor vs Marvin? Is it just a library vs framework type situation in terms of tradeoffs?
My only goal is to make structured output easier, I want to be thought of as more like 'requests' it just makes http/io a bit easier. Rather than say, a whole app framework.
Instructor only supports openai's function calls -> pydantic and then i mostly spend my time writing docs on how to think about this pattern.
Marvin has logic for custom apps, chat bots, functions, on different llm backends etc.
I've come to realize you better develop your own little library for LLMs instead of depending on complex libraries with hidden prompts here and there which you can't control.
People think LLMs are about connecting things (chaining) but you'll get that for free if you focus instead on the "content" and "behavior" of your LLMs.
The goal of instructor is that i dont write any prompts for you, i just make the openai.ChatCompletion.create call easier to manage and let you return a pass in a pydantic object and return an instance of it,
Whole codebase is 300 lines of code you can copy paste into your own repo into function_calls.py :)
Oh yeah I really like instructor and have been using it! I was more talking about complicated libraries (as opposed to 300 lines of — well structured code like instructor).
This was exactly my experience trying to build a RAG pipeline that answers complex questions by generating sub-questions [1]. The hidden prompts in the complex libraries are quite difficult to get to and then start tweaking, whereas writing my own pipeline boiled down the code to 4 LLM calls. +1 for using the instructor library for quick schema definitions!
Yeah, obligatory reminder that "chaining" is just function composition. As in:
SecondQuery(FirstQuery(userInput));
"Advanced" chaining can be as simple as:
do {
partial = FirstQuery(input);
choice = DeciderQuery(partial);
input = choice ? Query2A(partial) : Query2B(partial);
} while(!ValidationQuery(input));
return input; // or print it or whatever
It only looks complex when you need to chain things at runtime through some interface, but that's the usual problem of having to reinvent basic blocks of your language as objects or data structures because your language doesn't let you treat code and data interchangeably. But if you're just experimenting with chains, using the most basic programming building blocks directly - functions, conditionals, loops - is by far the easiest.
Oh, I didn't mean to invoke FP abstractions - "composition" is used outside of FP, and "partial"... that's just bad naming choice on my end. This example was meant to be dumb, imperative C-like code.
What if your validation logic could learn and adapt like a human but feel exactly like writing normal software. This is the future of validation and it's already here.
