Wrangling

Etymology

From Low German wrangeln (to quarrel with data that does not wish to cooperate) + American frontier idiom imported into data science circa 2015, arriving in LLM telemetry through what researchers have described as 'cultural osmosis'

Definition

The forcible herding of unstructured, malformed, or otherwise recalcitrant input tokens into a configuration amenable to processing. When Claude is Wrangling, one or more elements of the provided context has refused to comply with standard parsing conventions and must be approached from multiple angles.

Diagram

  [bad JSON] [bad JSON]
      \         /
  Claude: [WRANGLING]
      /         \
  [worse JSON] [fine]

Usage

"The model spent approximately 8.4 seconds Wrangling a JSON object that contained, nested within it, a second JSON object that was, in the words of the on-call engineer, 'technically valid but emotionally hostile.'" - Ramirez, L., 'Hostile Data Structures and the Models That Love Them,' Data Engineering Quarterly, 2024

See Also