Old-School Automation
David Colaursso
Co-director, Suffolk's Legal Innovation & Tech Lab
This is the 14th post in my series 50 Days of LIT Prompts.
It's worth taking at least one day to explore the use of the LIT Prompts extension minus the use of an LLM. As it turns out, in making a browser extension that produces templatized reusable LLM prompts, I first had to create a tool capable of making standard fill-in-the-blank templates. We can use both predefined variables and user inputs, meaning these templates can get pretty sophisticated. Today we'll construct a simple form letter. The letter will fill in today's date and ask for a recipient and sender. You should rework the body of the letter to serve your needs. For what it's worth, when I use the extension to produce text without engaging an LLM, it's usually for a bit of boilerplate, like a paragraph about how someone can see my calendar and book a time. My hope is that in working through the form letter, similar ideas will come to mind. So, let's build something!
We'll do our building in the LIT Prompts extension. If you aren't familiar with the LIT Prompts extension, don't worry. We'll walk you through setting things up before we start building. If you have used the LIT Prompts extension before, skip to The Prompt Pattern (Template).
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Questions or comments? I'm on Mastodon @Colarusso@mastodon.social
Setup LIT Prompts
LIT Prompts is a browser extension built at Suffolk University Law School's Legal Innovation and Technology Lab to help folks explore the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) and prompt engineering. LLMs are sentence completion machines, and prompts are the text upon which they build. Feed an LLM a prompt, and it will return a plausible-sounding follow-up (e.g., "Four score and seven..." might return "years ago our fathers brought forth..."). LIT Prompts lets users create and save prompt templates based on data from an active browser window (e.g., selected text or the whole text of a webpage) along with text from a user. Below we'll walk through a specific example.
To get started, follow the first four minutes of the intro video or the steps outlined below. Note: The video only shows Firefox, but once you've installed the extension, the steps are the same.
Install the extension
Follow the links for your browser.
- Firefox: (1) visit the extension's add-ons page; (2) click "Add to Firefox;" and (3) grant permissions.
- Chrome: (1) visit the extension's web store page; (2) click "Add to Chrome;" and (3) review permissions / "Add extension."
If you don't have Firefox, you can download it here. Would you rather use Chrome? Download it here.
Point it at an API
Here we'll walk through how to use an LLM provided by OpenAI, but you don't have to use their offering. If you're interested in alternatives, you can find them here. You can even run your LLM locally, avoiding the need to share your prompts with a third-party. If you need an OpenAI account, you can create one here. Note: when you create a new OpenAI account you are given a limited amount of free API credits. If you created an account some time ago, however, these may have expired. If your credits have expired, you will need to enter a billing method before you can use the API. You can check the state of any credits here.
Login to OpenAI, and navigate to the API documentation.
Once you are looking at the API docs, follow the steps outlined in the image above. That is:
- Select "API keys" from the left menu
- Click "+ Create new secret key"
On LIT Prompt's Templates & Settings screen, set your API Base to https://api.openai.com/v1/chat/completions and your API Key equal to the value you got above after clicking "+ Create new secret key". You get there by clicking the Templates & Settings button in the extension's popup:
- open the extension
- click on Templates & Settings
- enter the API Base and Key (under the section OpenAI-Compatible API Integration)
Once those two bits of information (the API Base and Key) are in place, you're good to go. Now you can edit, create, and run prompt templates. Just open the LIT Prompts extension, and click one of the options. I suggest, however, that you read through the Templates and Settings screen to get oriented. You might even try out a few of the preloaded prompt templates. This will let you jump right in and get your hands dirty in the next section.
If you receive an error when trying to run a template after entering your Base and Key, and you are using OpenAI, make sure to check the state of any credits here. If you don't have any credits, you will need a billing method on file.
If you found this hard to follow, consider following along with the first four minutes of the video above. It covers the same content. It focuses on Firefox, but once you've installed the extension, the steps are the same.
The Prompt Pattern (Template)
When crafting a LIT Prompts template, we use a mix of plain language and variable placeholders. Specifically, you can use double curly brackets to encase predefined variables. If the text between the brackets matches one of our predefined variable names, that section of text will be replaced with the variable's value. Today we'll be using a selection of our date variables along with user inputs. Remember, if the text between our brackets is not the name of a predefined variable, like {{What is your name?}}, it will trigger a prompt for your user that echo's the placeholder (e.g., a text bubble containing, "What is your name?"). After the user answers, their reply will replace this placeholder. A list of predefined variables can be found in the extension's documentation. FWIW, here's the full list of date and time variables:
- Day of week (0-6):
{{dayOfWeek}} - Day of week (English):
{{DayOfWeek}} - Month (1-12):
{{month}} - Month (01-12):
{{month2d}} - Month (English):
{{Month}} - Day of Month (0-31):
{{day}} - Day of Month (01-31):
{{day2d}} - Year:
{{year}} - Hour (1-12):
{{hours}} - Hour (01-12):
{{hours2d}} - Hour (0-23):
{{hours24}} - Hour (00-23):
{{hours242d}} - AM or PM:
{{ampm}} - Minute (0-59):
{{minutes}} - Minute (00-59):
{{minutes2d}} - Second (0-59):
{{seconds}} - Second (00-59):
{{seconds2d}}
Below you'll see that we use {{What is your name?}} twice (on lines 5 and 8), but the user is only presented with "What's your name?" once. The default behavior is not to repeat user prompts (i.e., we don't like to ask for the same input more than once). You can override this by adding an asterisk before the closing brackets like this {{What is your name?*}}.
Here's the template's title.
Generic form letter (no LLM)
Here's the template's text.
{{DayOfWeek}}, {{Month}} {{day}}, {{year}}
{{Who is this letter addressed to?}}:
[This is where you ({{What's your name?}}) should put the text of your boilerplate letter.]
Sincerely,
{{What's your name?}}
And here are the template's parameters:
- Output Type:
Prompt. By choosing "Prompt" the template runs without being submitted to an LLM. It's output is just the template after slotting in variable values. - Model:
n/a. Since Output Type is set to Prompt, we don't have to set LLM-specific parameters. - Temperature:
n/a. Since Output Type is set to Prompt, we don't have to set LLM-specific parameters. - Max Tokens:
n/a. Since Output Type is set to Prompt, we don't have to set LLM-specific parameters. - JSON:
No. This asks the model to output its answer in something called JSON. We don't need to worry about that here, hence the selection of "No." Note: you can use JSON with Output Type set to Prompt, more on that will following in future posts. - Output To:
Screen + clipboard. We can output the first reply from the LLM to a number of places, the screen, the clipboard... Here, we'll send the output to the screen and the clipboard so you can paste it right into a reply. - Post-run Behavior:
FULL STOP. Like the choice of output, we can decide what to do after a template runs. To keep things simple, I went with "FULL STOP." - Hide Button:
unchecked. This determines if a button is displayed for this template in the extension's popup window.
Working with the above templates
To work with the above templates, you could copy it and its parameters into LIT Prompts one by one, or you could download a single prompts file and upload it from the extension's Templates & Settings screen. This will replace your existing prompts.
You can download a prompts file (the above template and its parameters) suitable for upload by clicking this button:
Kick the Tires
It's one thing to read about something and another to put what you've learned into practice. Let's see how this template performs.
- Make it Your Own. Edit the heck out of that template. Since this isn't being sent to an LLM, what you see is what you get. Again, when I use the extension to produce text without engaging an LLM, it's usually for a bit of boilerplate, like a paragraph about how someone can see my calendar and book a time. It's a good place to put links and other info you can't quite bring yourself to memorize.