YAMs

YAMs are chat histories with LLMs declared as YAML, containing markdown strings used primarily to communicate with an Ollama API and aid in ideation or in agentic workflows.

Advantages:

• Extremely low-code with high developer ergonomics and inspectability.
• Provide an example workflow for developing LLM prompts involving structured data input and outputs.
• commiting and collaborating of chat's to VCS allows for rapid ideation

Example YAM

Generally a VCS Git repo might hav a docs or documentation folder, we can then create docs/yams/000-template.yaml and use that to jumpstart any new YAMs before commiting them. This allows YAMs to be further refined with peers in pull reqiests.

Here we might have a folder of recipies and the following YAM might be recipies/001-penut-butter-and-jelly.yaml

# YAMs context doc
# - everything in this file gets converted to JSON and sent to an Ollama LLM endpoint
# - single prompt with a context block provided as a markdown yaml codeblock
# - returns either the context block back a yaml, markdown or plain text

model: mistral
messages:
  - role: user
    content: >-
      Using the following context:

      ```yaml 
      type: recipe
      slug: ""
      title: "Peanut butter and jelly"
      ingredients:
        - name: Crunchy Peanut Butter
          quantity: 2
          unit: Tbsp
      steps:
        - Spread Peanut Butter on bread.
      ```

      Complete the document in the YAML code block.

      ```yaml

      ```

  # After we run bin/yams ./pbj.yaml
  # The following object will be added from the LLM's response

  - role: assistant
    content: |2-
       ```yaml
      type: recipe
      slug: "peanut-butter-and-jelly"
      title: "Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich"
      ingredients:
        - name: Crunchy Peanut Butter
          quantity: 2
          unit: Tbsp
        - name: Smooth Jelly or Jam (Strawberry, Grape, etc.)
          quantity: 3
          unit: Tbsp
      steps:
        - Spread a layer of Peanut Butter on one slice of bread.
        - Spread a layer of Jelly or Jam on another slice of bread.
        - Place the two slices together with their respective layers facing each other.
      ```

Whats in this Repo?

• bin/yams
  • Copy and customize this in your repos!
  • Use TODOs and an LLM to make quick modifictions to bin/yams if required (or re-implment and link to that here)
• examples/recipes/peanut-butter-and-jelly.yaml
  • committed after running the bin/yams script.
• New Prompt skeleton prompts are easy to generate by asking an LLM
  • Example: How would you define x as yaml (do note less is more on templates)
    • screenplay
    • recipe
    • business plan

Process:

• The chat history request body is specified as a YAML file.
  • Model is set as a top-level key in the YAMs with parameters from the Ollama API.
• YAML markdown codeblocks are used to pass structured data into an LLM prompt.
• Outputs are requested can be YAML markdown codeblocks or other structured and extracted for further processing

Implementation Notes:

• Located in bin/yams.
• Structured examples provide desired context for minimal YAML input.
• YAML is preferred for its natural language similarity and large corpus.
• Suitable for declarative LLM chats on private or public APIs.

TODOs

• Content key could be yaml directly rather than a markdown codeblock
• Provide notes on using hosted Ollama endpoints.
• Address YAML reformatting issues in initial message prompts.
• Improve templating.
• Rerun on file changes (with original prompt?)
• Stream results directly from curl responses into YAML for impact.

Naive Shell Implementation Example

This is a basic implementation of YAMs to complete a document generating a peanut butter and jelly recipe. We can complete it by running bin/yams examples/recipes/peanut-butter-and-jelly.yaml which will send this request to the specified Ollama API endpoint for completion.

Inside of examples/screenplays/cyberpunk-spirited-away.yaml is a starter YAMs I generated from this prompt to declare a screenplay as yaml. On