I’ve been following a newsletter that’s making the case for custom prompts to lead learners in conversation. This entry provides a structured prompt to have the tutor ask what education level the student is, then prompt for the assigment that they are to do (the instructions explicitly tell the AI not to do the assignent!), and then their work. The AI can then give feedback on their work based on the requirements that the work is supposed to fulfill. I did it with a class today and the feedback was surprisingly useful (though I had fairly low expectations).
I did this by forking the plugin, opening researcher.rb (looks like I should have used general.rb), saving it as mentor.rb, then searching for researcher and copying/paste/replacing researcher->mentor. I made the changes, deployed, and some testing in under an hour. (It even passed the specs!)
What I have suggested in the past was a full-blown way to add an arbitrary number of additional personalities, perhaps by having a category for personalities and using raw from the OP as the PROMPT. But having done my quick-and-dirty add-a-new-persona solution, I think what might be a much higher return on programming hours is to simply add 1-3 personas that include SiteSettings for the name of the persona and the prompt. Then an admin could quickly try out different prompts simply by changing the SiteSetting rather than re-deploying the plugin.
Is this something that might be considered for a PR? If not, shouldn’t I be able to make an add-on plugin that will add those and avoid having a fork? Any tips on how to do that in broad strokes?
This is timely, as I have just landed in Brazil after attending the OpenAI DevDay conference. One of the new features revealed there is basically what we created as personas built-in into their APIs itself, which they called “Assistants”.
The verdict is still in the air if we will migrate some of the AI Bot into this new API, but if we do it will make a lot easier to create new custom personas, since you only would need to provide a name and the assistant ID.
I have wanted this for many months, it is a game changer and I have know about this being a game changer for a very long time. We will get there … for sure.
Give us a few weeks here, what I can do in the mean time is at least provide a way to create custom personas from the console, and then we can follow on with UI a bit further down the line.
