A Case Study in Engineering a Conversational Programming Assistant’s Persona

The Programmer's Assistant is an experimental prototype software development environment that integrates a chatbot with a code editor. Conversational capability was achieved by using an existing code-fluent Large Language Model and providing it with a prompt that establishes a conversational interaction pattern, a set of conventions, and a style of interaction appropriate for the application. A discussion of the evolution of the prompt provides a case study in how to coax an existing foundation model to behave in a desirable manner for a particular application.