• Plang: A language blending natural prompt with control flow for precise LLM guidance. • Meta-prompt programming: Enables LLM to self-modify prompt programs during execution. • 40.75%-89.55% conciseness gain: Outperforms methods like LangChain in prompt coding. • Open-source solution: Enables multi-agent collaboration & tool use with minimal code. The advent of instruction-following large language models (LLMs), exemplified by ChatGPT, has significantly enhanced the performance of generative autoregressive natural language models on general tasks, marking a crucial milestone toward artificial general intelligence. While research has shown that LLM performance critically depends on prompt effectiveness, existing prompt construction approaches - including prompt string templates, prompt programming frameworks, and prompt programming syntactic sugar - suffer from limitations in imprecise generation control and deviation from natural language syntax, thereby impeding prompt engineering advancement. To address these challenges, we introduce PromptLanguage (Plang), a string-first programming language designed specifically for LLM prompt engineering. Our key innovation lies in utilizing font styles as syntax keywords to seamlessly integrate natural language prompt text with control flow code, enabling precise intervention in the generation process while maintaining the natural language affinity of prompt programs. Notably, Plang pioneers the concept of meta-prompt programming. Extensive experimental results across prompt engineering cases and quantitative analyses demonstrate that Plang-written prompt programs offer superior read/writability, intervention precision and up to 89.55% efficiency improvements. The Plang implementation is available as open-source software at https://github.com/HJZ-XDU/plang .

In this paper, we interpret the community question answering websites on the StackExchange platform as knowledge markets, and analyze how and why these markets can fail at scale. A knowledge market framing allows site operators to reason about market failures, and to design policies to prevent them. Our goal is to provide insights on large-scale knowledge market failures through an interpretable model. We explore a set of interpretable economic production models on a large empirical dataset to analyze the dynamics of content generation in knowledge markets. Amongst these, the Cobb-Douglas model best explains empirical data and provides an intuitive explanation for content generation through the concepts of elasticity and diminishing returns. Content generation depends on user participation and also on how specific types of content (e.g. answers) depends on other types (e.g. questions). We show that these factors of content generation have constant elasticity and a percentage increase in any of the inputs leads to a constant percentage increase in the output. Furthermore, markets exhibit diminishing returns-the marginal output decreases as the input is incrementally increased. Knowledge markets also vary on their returns to scale-the increase in output resulting from a proportionate increase in all inputs. Importantly, many knowledge markets exhibit diseconomies of scale-measures of market health (e.g., the percentage of questions with an accepted answer) decrease as a function of the number of participants. The implications of our work are two-fold: site operators ought to design incentives as a function of system size (number of participants); the market lens should shed insight into complex dependencies amongst different content types and participant actions in general social networks.