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background
epoch0 is a server/study group that i started for ppl to study math/ml/cs together.
i put out a couple tweets that kind of blew up and directed a lot of attention to the janky waitlist form i had made for the server.
so that led to 500 ppl filling out this form (counting an older typeform i’d made)
the challenge
what i didn’t want to do was explicitly judge the people based on their skills, past, present etc.
i just wanted to reject spammy, low-effort and unmotivated people from the form because that creates noise.
clarity, motivation, similarity was a big plus i was looking out for.
mostly i just wanted to filter spam/troll/low effort out.
claude to the rescue
i wrote a “spec” for what i want epoch 0 to look like and then used claude to help me think through how i should evaluate the form entries.
it asked a bunch of really cool questions, which was amazing
a little bit of back and forth and i made it generate a system and user prompt for gpt-4o with an evaluation document, input format of the form entry and a JSON schema for the results.
i just wanted the entries to be classified against into;
- Highly Recommended
- Recommended
- Consider
- Not Recommended (basically the people i wanna filter out)
duct taping it together ft. mr. 4o
evals are important
after that i tested it out against a handful of people who were already in the server to see how well it “recommended”
then i tested it out against a handful of applications that were troll-y to see how well it rejected
then i tested it out against some applications which i hadn’t seen before;
- i went through it and came up with my own recommendation
- i added a “justification” field in the json schema
- i then checked mr. 4o’s response to see how well it aligns with my classification
after this sanity check, we were good to go!
results
what i was dreading to do for an entire day took me like 1 hour.
in the end i sent out the invite to 290 people.
many of them started joining immediately. this is what the # intro channel looks like rn.
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