DSPy From First Principles 05: Build Programs From Programs

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 10:20:00 +0100

Build Programs From Programs

In chapter 4 we ran the same signature with different execution policies. That helped isolate one question:

Should this behavior be attempted directly or with intermediate reasoning?

Real applications usually ask a larger question. A sentence-improvement system may need to find what is wrong, generate a candidate, assess risk, and return something the rest of the product can store.

That is where a single LM call starts to hide several distinct operations.

Building the Complete Agent

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 10:00:00 +0100

Every mechanism in this book was argued against a problem chosen to isolate it.

That isolation was deliberate, and it was also a form of protection. The memory chapter picked a task where recall was the bottleneck, held everything else still, and measured the one thing it came to measure. The result is a clean explanation and a weak claim. Nothing in it establishes that the same retrieval policy behaves when a search controller is expanding forty nodes, or when a verifier insists that every piece of evidence carry a state identity the search controller has never heard of.

Composition on Programmer.ie

DSPy From First Principles 05: Build Programs From Programs

Build Programs From Programs

Building the Complete Agent