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AI · March 20, 2023

Recursive LLM Prompts

I've been playing with the idea of an LLM prompt that causes the model to generate and return a new prompt. https://github.com/andyk/recursive_llm The idea I'm starting with is to implement recursion using English as the programming language and GPT as the runtime. It’s kind of like traditional recursion in code, but instead of having a function that calls itself with a different set of arguments, there is a prompt that returns itself with specific parts updated to reflect the new arguments. Here is a prompt for infinitely generating Fibonacci numbers: > You are a…

Recursive LLM Prompts launched on March 20, 2023 with 97 votes, #608 of 5,007 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 3 years on.

In plain words

Recursive LLM Prompts is a tool that uses language models to implement recursion through English-language prompts rather than traditional code. Instead of functions calling themselves, prompts return modified versions of themselves with updated variables to reflect new parameters. The approach treats English as a programming language and the language model as the runtime, enabling iterative computation like generating infinite Fibonacci sequences. It's designed for developers exploring unconventional ways to structure computation through large language models.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

Implement recursion using English as the programming language and an LLM as the runtime. - andyk/recursive_llm

In the maker’s words, at launch

I've been playing with the idea of an LLM prompt that causes the model to generate and return a new prompt. https://github.com/andyk/recursive_llm The idea I'm starting with is to implement recursion using English as the programming language and GPT as the runtime. It’s kind of like traditional…

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