I have been hearing the term 'context engineering' and wanted to share my article about it, which is mostly focusing on AI npcs and not enterprise use cases.
For longer threads I find frequent prompting for sectional summaries along the lines of spaced repetition helpful.
Recently was evaluating some investment property for a friend that had valuable timber, historic notability, distressed foundation and structural elements, compromised access, and utility hookup challenges.
I would document and tackle all of the structural challenges then have ai summarize. Move on to all the access challenges. Summarize. All of the historic noteworthiness criteria etc.
Most people passed on the site because of one or other deal breakers but by synthesizing summaries was able to discover assistance programs targeted for “ag + historic” or “historic + access” initiatives etc that made the numbers pencil out as a “no-brainer” investment. These wouldn’t have unlocked otherwise without five decades of experience rehabilitating farmhouses in this part of the country.
Anyway, I imagine a similar approach would work for enriching NPC interactions in a game world.
Sounds like his original system was for the AI characters to be fed all events that happen in the universe. Then he changed it so that the AI characters were only fed events they reasonably should have gotten. Makes sense and seems like a great idea.
Something I wonder—often in a game, the focus follows the player character, and the universe stops when we go away. Maybe a simplified model will run to represent time passing while we are away, in games where that sort of thing matters. This is fine because our NPCs are basically static, if you freeze them, and then wake them up when the PC shows up. They aren’t deep enough for the missing day to day events to matter.
But, with more complex NPCs, will the fact that their lives pause while we’re gone shatter the illusion? It seems like his original system (the universe broadcasts to every NPC even while they are not doing anything) could fudge that a bit and retain a feeling of ongoing background life, in some cases. While in the new system they are ready frozen…
I dunno. What to do? Maybe run a simplified model and have it generate some appropriate local events for the NPCs while they are frozen (some, fewer than when they were on the receiving end of the whole universe).
>In my local ai (mistral-nemo) around 10 thousand tokens of context decreases my token gen speed from 70t/s to 20 t/s . And the LLM starts ignoring the context after a while.
as much as it pains me to say this, only cloud models are somewhat viable for this. AI-powered NPCs are my dream too, and after many attempts with countless local and cloud models, I've given up for now. locals are retarded and incurably sloppy, clouds can be tard-wrangled into producing somewhat decent prose, but they are prohibitively expensive.
mistral models are particularly soulless and full of cliches.
I think people forget that all AI inference is role playing to some extent. It pretends to be a chatbot, or a programmer, or whatever. There is no real difference between that and telling it to pretend to be a wizard.
My OS gets slower and buggy if I don't reboot. So I'll try to convince my users to reboot often and optimize their workflows for rebootability.
Feels like trying to solve a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place.
Once an OS that doesn't require reboots appear, this concept will look silly and everyone that optimized their workflows for reboots will look like dorks.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 31.8 ms ] threadWe will probably get something more formalized , like "context occlusion", for games in the future.
Recently was evaluating some investment property for a friend that had valuable timber, historic notability, distressed foundation and structural elements, compromised access, and utility hookup challenges.
I would document and tackle all of the structural challenges then have ai summarize. Move on to all the access challenges. Summarize. All of the historic noteworthiness criteria etc.
Most people passed on the site because of one or other deal breakers but by synthesizing summaries was able to discover assistance programs targeted for “ag + historic” or “historic + access” initiatives etc that made the numbers pencil out as a “no-brainer” investment. These wouldn’t have unlocked otherwise without five decades of experience rehabilitating farmhouses in this part of the country.
Anyway, I imagine a similar approach would work for enriching NPC interactions in a game world.
Something I wonder—often in a game, the focus follows the player character, and the universe stops when we go away. Maybe a simplified model will run to represent time passing while we are away, in games where that sort of thing matters. This is fine because our NPCs are basically static, if you freeze them, and then wake them up when the PC shows up. They aren’t deep enough for the missing day to day events to matter.
But, with more complex NPCs, will the fact that their lives pause while we’re gone shatter the illusion? It seems like his original system (the universe broadcasts to every NPC even while they are not doing anything) could fudge that a bit and retain a feeling of ongoing background life, in some cases. While in the new system they are ready frozen…
I dunno. What to do? Maybe run a simplified model and have it generate some appropriate local events for the NPCs while they are frozen (some, fewer than when they were on the receiving end of the whole universe).
as much as it pains me to say this, only cloud models are somewhat viable for this. AI-powered NPCs are my dream too, and after many attempts with countless local and cloud models, I've given up for now. locals are retarded and incurably sloppy, clouds can be tard-wrangled into producing somewhat decent prose, but they are prohibitively expensive.
mistral models are particularly soulless and full of cliches.
https://eqbench.com/creative_writing_longform.html
https://eqbench.com/results/creative-writing-longform/mistra...
Feels like trying to solve a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place.
Once an OS that doesn't require reboots appear, this concept will look silly and everyone that optimized their workflows for reboots will look like dorks.