500 Characters? I’ll Make It Fit!
David Colaursso
Co-director, Suffolk's Legal Innovation & Tech Lab
This is the 27th post in my series 50 Days of LIT Prompts.
Confronted with a character limit, have you ever found your reply too long? If so, today's prompt template is for you. Compress your writing with the click of a button. No longer must we sign off with "I would have written a shorter email, but I did not have the time." Eat your heart out Pascal!
To see the template in action, I have chosen to focus on the sage advice of Polonius:
This business is well ended. My liege, and madam, to expostulate What majesty should be, what duty is, Why day is day, night night, and time is time Were nothing but to waste night, day, and time. Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit, And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief. Your noble son is mad. "Mad" call I it, for, to define true madness, What is't but to be nothing else but mad? But let that go.
Which today's template turned into:
This business is concluded. I will be brief: Your son is mad. To define true madness is to be nothing else but mad.
And when I ran that through the template I got:
This business is done. Your son is truly mad.
And since I couldn't resist, one more time!
The business is done. Your son is mad.
Polonius may think brevity is the soul of wit, but he sure doesn't act like it. ;)
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).
Up Next
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 {{highlighted}}. See the extension's documentation.
The {{highlighted}} variable contains any text you have highlighted/selected in the active browser tab when you open the extension. This prompt pattern is pretty straight forward. Highlight some text of an email, and run the template. The LLM will generate a shortened version of the text and place it in your clipboard. To accomplish this last part, be sure to set output to "Screen + clipboard."
Here's the template's title.
Shorten text
Here's the template's text.
You're a helpful editor and you're going to help trim some text. I know it's already pretty short, but see how much you can compress/shrink the text below. When you rewrite it, knock off at least 20% of the length, but keep the main points:
{{highlighted}}
And here are the template's parameters:
- Output Type:
LLM. This choice means that we'll "run" the template through an LLM (i.e., this will ping an LLM and return a result). Alternatively, we could have chosen "Prompt," in which case the extension would return the text of the completed template. - Model:
gpt-4o-mini. This input specifies what model we should use when running the prompt. Available models differ based on your API provider. See e.g., OpenAI's list of models. - Temperature:
0.7. Temperature runs from 0 to 1 and specifies how "random" the answer should be. Here I'm using 0.7 because I'm happy to have the text be a little "creative." - Max Tokens:
250. This number specifies how long the reply can be. Tokens are chunks of text the model uses to do its thing. They don't quite match up with words but are close. 1 token is something like 3/4 of a word. Smaller token limits run faster. - 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." - Output To:
Screen + clipboard. We can output the first reply from the LLM to a number of places, the screen, the clipboard... Here, I've chosen the screen and clipboard so the results will be ready to paste where we like. - 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 template
To work with the above template, 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 brief. After adding this template to your extension, wait for the inevitable moment when you run into a character limit on the web, then give it a go.
TL;DR References
ICYMI, if you didn't click through above, you might want to give this a look now.
- Hamlet, Prince of Denmark by William Shakespeare. I'll take any chance I can to share the fact that Project Gutenberg has a great selection of public domain works available to read on the web or with your e-reader. This link will get you the whole play. Enjoy!