Principle Stash

Comic

A hand-drawn double-headed arrow. Above it, RUNTIME at the left end and COMPILED at the right. Below it, two more pairs running the same way: PAY EVERY CALL and ONE-OFF TASKS at the left, PAY ONCE and RECURRING WORK at the right. Six marks along the line, each with a small drawn icon above it, read left to right: user prompt (a speech bubble), system prompt (a window with a title bar), skill file (a page with a folded corner), LoRA adapter (a small module with prongs), fine-tuned model (a box with two sliders), its own model (a chip with legs). An arrow points up at the gap between skill file and LoRA adapter, annotated: somewhere in here, knowledge stops being read and starts being remembered.

How Many Times Do I Have to Tell You?

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A few thousand system prompts in, the training run starts looking cheap.

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Appears in Where Does Software Engineering Go From Here? (Part 1)

Transcript

The line — a double-headed arrow. Above it, RUNTIME on the left and COMPILED on the right. Below it, two more pairs pointing the same way: PAY EVERY CALL and ONE-OFF TASKS on the left, PAY ONCE and RECURRING WORK on the right.

Six marks along it, each drawn with its own small icon: user prompt, a speech bubble. System prompt, a window with a title bar. Skill file, a page with a folded corner. LoRA adapter, a little module with prongs on it. Fine-tuned model, a box with two sliders. Its own model, a chip with legs.

The aside — an arrow points up into the gap between the skill file and the adapter: “somewhere in here, knowledge stops being read and starts being remembered.”