English

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

Computers and Society 2023-01-25 v1 Artificial Intelligence Human-Computer Interaction

Abstract

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.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2301.10016,
  title  = {A Case Study in Engineering a Conversational Programming Assistant's Persona},
  author = {Steven I. Ross and Michael Muller and Fernando Martinez and Stephanie Houde and Justin D. Weisz},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2301.10016},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

11 pages. Submitted to the 4th Workshop on Human-AI Co-Creation with Generative Models (HAI-GEN) at IUI 2023

R2 v1 2026-06-28T08:18:39.636Z