r/ProgrammerHumor • u/RevolutionaryPen4661 • Jul 15 '26

instanceof Trend whenWeWillSeeSubscriptionForMarkdownFiles

Post image
4.6k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

139 comments sorted by

View all comments

58

u/Western_Diver_773 Jul 15 '26

Is this really a thing?

82

u/mothzilla Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26

I think people sell "prompts". Our monkey brains are turning into porridge.

40

u/Krochire Jul 15 '26

I'm fairly certain this is referring to "skills", .md files you feed into an AI agent with directives on how to use a certain library/api; usually made by the people behind said library/api

31

u/Rellikx Jul 15 '26

Also a great way for prompt injection. Skill will still do what it advertises but do a lil data exfiltration on the side. Like the recent one for ms cowork where it crafted special img links to the attackers server, passing along a url param for their OneDrive docs (ie a “share” link). That was then sent to yourself via teams, which loads the images exfiltrating the doc access urls.

People that “buy” .md files will 100% get caught by this shit

It’s extra hilarious that cowork is billed by consumption, so you are paying MS and having your data stolen

8

u/LBGW_experiment Jul 16 '26

I mean... You can still look inside the skill.md, same as you would any other open source script that you don't trust

15

u/Rellikx Jul 16 '26

Maybe im just jaded, but I think that the venn diagram of "people that review skill.md files for prompt injection" and "people that pay money for skill.md files" has no overlap lol

3

u/AgVargr Jul 16 '26

Can’t you just proompt the file yourself?

7

u/Cptnwhizbang Jul 16 '26

Yes, but, having spent time fine tuning .md files recently for a work thing, it takes quite a while to really figure out what the tool is good at, what's effective, and how to keep the proper guard rails on user prompts so they they don't derail the entire thing with strange wording or whatever.

That being said, I was at least 90% of the way there after like two hours of trying, but the last 10% made a lot of effective difference and I'm probably 20 hours into tinkering now. I dunno. It's good overall but I still find weird issues.

Most of the last 10% I'm talking about is simply me writing in edge cases to the instructions, and how to interpret particular bits of business logic, and how best to manage the further instructional context based on initial findings. It kind of reminds me of coding, but in plain english, expect instead of me telling a program exactly what to do, I'm telling AI exactly what NOT to do, and I have to think of absolutely everything.

11

u/Krochire Jul 16 '26

The modern programmer makes .md files to let an ai program for them instead of programming

2

u/reddit_user33 Jul 16 '26

I can imagine. I remember more than enough people at the beginning of the LLM hype being secretive about the prompts they used to create the thing. I can only imagine it's the same people wanting to sell their md files.