✨ Promptbook: AI apps in plain Language

Write AI applications using plain human language across multiple models and platforms.

🌟 New Features

• 💡 VS Code support for .book files with syntax highlighting and IntelliSense
• 🐳 Official Docker image (hejny/promptbook) for seamless containerized usage
• 🔥 Native support for OpenAI o3-mini, GPT-4 and other leading LLMs
• 🔍 DeepSeek integration for advanced knowledge search

🤍 The Book Abstract

It's time for a paradigm shift! The future of software is written in plain English, French, or Latin.

During the computer revolution, we have seen multiple generations of computer languages, from the physical rewiring of the vacuum tubes through low-level machine code to the high-level languages like Python or JavaScript. And now, we're on the edge of the next revolution!

It's a revolution of writing software in plain human language that is understandable and executable by both humans and machines – and it's going to change everything!

The incredible growth in power of microprocessors and the Moore's Law have been the driving force behind the ever-more powerful languages, and it's been an amazing journey! Similarly, the large language models (like GPT or Claude) are the next big thing in language technology, and they're set to transform the way we interact with computers.

This shift will happen whether we're ready or not. Our mission is to make it excellent, not just good.

Join us in this journey!

🚀 Get started

Take a look at the simple starter kit with books integrated into the Hello World sample applications:

• Hello Book
• Hello Book in Node.js
• Hello Book in Next.js

💜 The Promptbook Project

Promptbook project is ecosystem of multiple projects and tools, following is a list of most important pieces of the project:

Project	About
Book language	Book is a human-understandable markup language for writing AI applications such as chatbots, knowledge bases, agents, avarars, translators, automations and more. There is also a plugin for VSCode to support .book file extension
Promptbook Engine	Promptbook engine can run applications written in Book language. It is released as multiple NPM packages and Docker HUB
Promptbook Studio	Promptbook.studio is a web-based editor and runner for book applications. It is still in the experimental MVP stage.

Hello world examples:

• Hello world
• Hello world in Node.js
• Hello world in Next.js

🌐 Community & Social Media

Join our growing community of developers and users:

Platform	Description
💬 Discord	Join our active developer community for discussions and support
🗣️ GitHub Discussions	Technical discussions, feature requests, and community Q&A
👔 LinkedIn	Professional updates and industry insights
📱 Facebook	General announcements and community engagement
🔗 ptbk.io	Official landing page with project information

🖼️ Product & Brand Channels

Promptbook.studio

📸 Instagram @promptbook.studio

Visual updates, UI showcases, and design inspiration

📘 Book Language Blueprint

A concise, Markdown-based DSL for crafting AI workflows and automations.

Introduction

Book is a Markdown-based language that simplifies the creation of AI applications, workflows, and automations. With human-readable commands, you can define inputs, outputs, personas, knowledge sources, and actions—without needing model-specific details.

Example

1# 🌟 My First Book
2
3-   BOOK VERSION 1.0.0
4-   URL https://promptbook.studio/hello.book
5-   INPUT PARAMETER {topic}
6-   OUTPUT PARAMETER {article}
7
8# Write an Article
9
10-   PERSONA Jane, marketing specialist with prior experience in tech and AI writing
11-   KNOWLEDGE https://wikipedia.org/
12-   KNOWLEDGE ./journalist-ethics.pdf
13-   EXPECT MIN 1 Sentence
14-   EXPECT MAX 5 Pages
15
16> Write an article about {topic}
17
18→ {article}

Each part of the book defines one of three circles:

1. What: Workflows, Tasks and Parameters

What work needs to be done. Each book defines a workflow (scenario or pipeline), which is one or more tasks. Each workflow has a fixed input and output. For example, you have a book that generates an article from a topic. Once it generates an article about AI, once about marketing, once about cooking. The workflow (= your AI program) is the same, only the input and output change.

Related commands:

• PARAMETER

2. Who: Personas

Who does the work. Each task is performed by a persona. A persona is a description of your virtual employee. It is a higher abstraction than the model, tokens, temperature, top-k, top-p and other model parameters.

You can describe what you want in human language like Jane, creative writer with a sense of sharp humour instead of gpt-4-2024-13-31, temperature 1.2, top-k 40, STOP token ".\n",....

Personas can have access to different knowledge, tools and actions. They can also consult their work with other personas or user, if allowed.

Related commands:

• PERSONA

3. How: Knowledge, Instruments and Actions

The resources used by the personas are used to do the work.

Related commands:

• KNOWLEDGE of documents, websites, and other resources
• INSTRUMENT for real-time data like time, location, weather, stock prices, searching the internet, calculations, etc.
• ACTION for actions like sending emails, creating files, ending a workflow, etc.

General Principles

Book language is based on markdown. It is subset of markdown. It is designed to be easy to read and write. It is designed to be understandable by both humans and machines and without specific knowledge of the language.

The file has a .book extension and uses UTF-8 encoding without BOM.

Books have two variants: flat — just a prompt without structure, and full — with tasks, commands, and prompts.

As it is source code, it can leverage all the features of version control systems like git and does not suffer from the problems of binary formats, proprietary formats, or no-code solutions.

But unlike programming languages, it is designed to be understandable by non-programmers and non-technical people.

📚 Documentation

See detailed guides and API reference in the docs or online.

🔒 Security

For information on reporting security vulnerabilities, see our Security Policy.

📦 Packages (for developers)

This library is divided into several packages, all are published from single monorepo. You can install all of them at once:

1npm i ptbk

Or you can install them separately:

⭐ Marked packages are worth to try first

• ⭐ ptbk - Bundle of all packages, when you want to install everything and you don't care about the size

• promptbook - Same as ptbk

• ⭐🧙‍♂️ @promptbook/wizard - Wizard to just run the books in node without any struggle

• @promptbook/core - Core of the library, it contains the main logic for promptbooks

• @promptbook/node - Core of the library for Node.js environment

• @promptbook/browser - Core of the library for browser environment

• ⭐ @promptbook/utils - Utility functions used in the library but also useful for individual use in preprocessing and postprocessing LLM inputs and outputs

• @promptbook/markdown-utils - Utility functions used for processing markdown

• (Not finished) @promptbook/wizard - Wizard for creating+running promptbooks in single line

• @promptbook/javascript - Execution tools for javascript inside promptbooks

• @promptbook/openai - Execution tools for OpenAI API, wrapper around OpenAI SDK

• @promptbook/anthropic-claude - Execution tools for Anthropic Claude API, wrapper around Anthropic Claude SDK

• @promptbook/vercel - Adapter for Vercel functionalities

• @promptbook/google - Integration with Google's Gemini API

• @promptbook/deepseek - Integration with DeepSeek API

• @promptbook/ollama - Integration with Ollama API

• @promptbook/azure-openai - Execution tools for Azure OpenAI API

• @promptbook/fake-llm - Mocked execution tools for testing the library and saving the tokens

• @promptbook/remote-client - Remote client for remote execution of promptbooks

• @promptbook/remote-server - Remote server for remote execution of promptbooks

• @promptbook/pdf - Read knowledge from .pdf documents

• @promptbook/documents - Integration of Markitdown by Microsoft

• @promptbook/documents - Read knowledge from documents like .docx, .odt,…

• @promptbook/legacy-documents - Read knowledge from legacy documents like .doc, .rtf,…

• @promptbook/website-crawler - Crawl knowledge from the web

• @promptbook/editable - Editable book as native javascript object with imperative object API

• @promptbook/templates - Useful templates and examples of books which can be used as a starting point

• @promptbook/types - Just typescript types used in the library

• ⭐ @promptbook/cli - Command line interface utilities for promptbooks

• 🐋 Docker image - Promptbook server

📚 Dictionary

The following glossary is used to clarify certain concepts:

General LLM / AI terms

• Prompt drift is a phenomenon where the AI model starts to generate outputs that are not aligned with the original prompt. This can happen due to the model's training data, the prompt's wording, or the model's architecture.
• Pipeline, workflow scenario or chain is a sequence of tasks that are executed in a specific order. In the context of AI, a pipeline can refer to a sequence of AI models that are used to process data.
• Fine-tuning is a process where a pre-trained AI model is further trained on a specific dataset to improve its performance on a specific task.
• Zero-shot learning is a machine learning paradigm where a model is trained to perform a task without any labeled examples. Instead, the model is provided with a description of the task and is expected to generate the correct output.
• Few-shot learning is a machine learning paradigm where a model is trained to perform a task with only a few labeled examples. This is in contrast to traditional machine learning, where models are trained on large datasets.
• Meta-learning is a machine learning paradigm where a model is trained on a variety of tasks and is able to learn new tasks with minimal additional training. This is achieved by learning a set of meta-parameters that can be quickly adapted to new tasks.
• Retrieval-augmented generation is a machine learning paradigm where a model generates text by retrieving relevant information from a large database of text. This approach combines the benefits of generative models and retrieval models.
• Longtail refers to non-common or rare events, items, or entities that are not well-represented in the training data of machine learning models. Longtail items are often challenging for models to predict accurately.

Note: This section is not a complete dictionary, more list of general AI / LLM terms that has connection with Promptbook

💯 Core concepts

• 📚 Collection of pipelines
• 📯 Pipeline
• 🙇‍♂️ Tasks and pipeline sections
• 🤼 Personas
• ⭕ Parameters
• 🚀 Pipeline execution
• 🧪 Expectations - Define what outputs should look like and how they're validated
• ✂️ Postprocessing - How outputs are refined after generation
• 🔣 Words not tokens - The human-friendly way to think about text generation
• ☯ Separation of concerns - How Book language organizes different aspects of AI workflows

Advanced concepts

Data & Knowledge Management	Pipeline Control
📚 Knowledge (RAG) - Retrieve and use external information 📽 Media handling - Working with images, audio, video, spreadsheets 🔴 Anomaly detection - Identifying unusual patterns or outputs	🌏 Remote server - Executing workflows on remote infrastructure 🃏 Jokers (conditions) - Adding conditional logic to workflows 🔳 Metaprompting - Creating prompts that generate other prompts
Language & Output Control	Advanced Generation
🌏 Linguistically typed languages - Type systems for natural language 🌍 Auto-Translations - Automatic multilingual support 👮 Agent adversary expectations - Safety and control mechanisms	🔙 Expectation-aware generation - Outputs that meet defined criteria ⏳ Just-in-time fine-tuning - Dynamic model adaptation

🔍 View more concepts

🚂 Promptbook Engine

➕➖ When to use Promptbook?

➕ When to use

• When you are writing app that generates complex things via LLM - like websites, articles, presentations, code, stories, songs,...
• When you want to separate code from text prompts
• When you want to describe complex prompt pipelines and don't want to do it in the code
• When you want to orchestrate multiple prompts together
• When you want to reuse parts of prompts in multiple places
• When you want to version your prompts and test multiple versions
• When you want to log the execution of prompts and backtrace the issues

See more

➖ When not to use

• When you have already implemented single simple prompt and it works fine for your job
• When OpenAI Assistant (GPTs) is enough for you
• When you need streaming (this may be implemented in the future, see discussion).
• When you need to use something other than JavaScript or TypeScript (other languages are on the way, see the discussion)
• When your main focus is on something other than text - like images, audio, video, spreadsheets (other media types may be added in the future, see discussion)
• When you need to use recursion (see the discussion)

See more

🐜 Known issues

• 🤸‍♂️ Iterations not working yet
• ⤵️ Imports not working yet

🧼 Intentionally not implemented features

• ➿ No recursion
• 🏳 There are no types, just strings

❔ FAQ

If you have a question start a discussion, open an issue or write me an email.

• ❔ Why not just use the OpenAI SDK / Anthropic Claude SDK / ...?
• ❔ How is it different from the OpenAI`s GPTs?
• ❔ How is it different from the Langchain?
• ❔ How is it different from the DSPy?
• ❔ How is it different from anything?
• ❔ Is Promptbook using RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)?
• ❔ Is Promptbook using function calling?

📅 Changelog

See CHANGELOG.md

📜 License

This project is licensed under BUSL 1.1.

🤝 Contributing

We welcome contributions! See CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines.

You can also ⭐ star the project, follow us on GitHub or various other social networks.We are open to pull requests, feedback, and suggestions.

🆘 Support & Community

Need help with Book language? We're here for you!

• 💬 Join our Discord community for real-time support
• 📝 Browse our GitHub discussions for FAQs and community knowledge
• 🐛 Report issues for bugs or feature requests
• 📚 Visit ptbk.io for more resources and documentation
• 📧 Contact us directly through the channels listed in our signpost

We welcome contributions and feedback to make Book language better for everyone!