How to run the flow? Any API?

[chendwww]

Hello, I read the doc and test it on the playgroud, but I don't see how to run a flow? Is there any API to run a flow or other methods allow our to trigger flow run after we create a flow?

Thanks

[ianarawjo]

Hi there, What are you trying to use CF for? To run, you would typically click the green Play |> buttons. Do you need to automate this for some reason?

[dmahlow]

Not OP, but for integrating this into some CI/CD flow (similar to how e.g. promptfoo is used) a sort of headless and/or API based execution could be useful.

[ianarawjo]

dmahlow, our thoughts now are two things: export to some intermediate YAML representation, and/or integrate explorted flows with promptfoo.

To be honest, I don't think it's useful for us to try to do more than serve as a prototyping/exploratory front-end to rapid prototype prompt flows and LLM audits. The benefit of promptfoo is that it is a software engineering test framework designed for software engineers, akin to unit tests. However, its drawback is that there's little to no front-end for exploration, making it hard to use for rapid prototyping, which is critical to the early stages of development. CF, by contrast, has a great front-end UI for rapid prototyping and exploration, but isn't geared towards software engineering practice (and isn't meant to be solely focused on that). I think, actually, the projects would be best served by coming together, rather than trying to haphazardly implement features from the other tool.

Nevertheless I do agree it would be useful to ease the export of these flows, once users are ready to go further and integrate them in some kind of programming application. The compromise is that export would be one-way, and not integrated into every change to the flow. At the very least, we could do YAML exports.

To be clear, this decision is mainly about limited time. I am the only person coding the project, and I need to decide what features to prioritize. If the community wants CF as an API, they should make Pull Requests in this direction.