Kork

Kork is an experimental Langchain chain that can write and execute code safely.

Kork cannot write arbitrary code. If that's what you need, save yourself some time and use docker and a real programming language.

Kork does not aim implement a fully functional programming language, but to make it easier to get an LLM to code that is safe and useful for a constrained problem domain.

A calculator powered by natural language is one example of a constrained problem domain.

The main feature of the Kork programming language and interpreter is that it does not have any features. To do useful things with Kork a user specifies foreign functions that can be called from the Kork interpreter by the chain. The chain uses an LLM to translate a user query into a Kork program, which is then executed by a Kork interpreter.

Safety

Nothing is bulletproof when humans are involved.

• Don't do silly things like exposing eval as a foreign function.
• If a foreign function allocates memory, the LLM could ask for more memory than is available crashing the process.
• Think carefully about whether the LLM could behave maliciously before trusting its output.

Quality

The short version: No benchmarks yet!

The long version: Quality of generated programs depends on many factors.

You can experiment with tweaking the prompt (e.g., explain the syntax of the language), changing the foreign function retriever (e.g., retrieve the most relevant foreign functions based on the user query), or providing examples in the form of (query, expected program).

The prompt, examples and syntax of the language can trip up the LLM to assume it's programming in a specific language (e.g., typescript or python) and assume that it can use language features that are not supported by Kork or to import libraries that are not available.

Limitations

• The Kork language and interpreter are limited to function invocation, variable declaration and basic arithmetic (no function declaration, loops etc.)
• Only supporting int, float, str, type(None), bool types. No support for lists or object types.
• Very limited type annotations.

Future Work

Let us know if you're interested in contributing or have ideas for improvements!

• Allow enabling/disabling language features
• Allow changing underlying language syntax
• Add support for objects
• Add other language features (e.g., loops)
• Provide foreign function retriever implementations based on similarity to user query

Compatibility

Kork is tested against python 3.8, 3.9, 3.10, 3.11.

Installation

pip install kork

🙏 Appreciation

• Lark -- For making it easy to define a grammar and parse it!
• Bob Nystrom -- For writing Crafting Interpreters!

© Contributing

If you have any ideas or feature requests, please open an issue and share!

See CONTRIBUTING.md for more information.

🎶 Why the name?

Fast to type and maybe sufficiently unique.