A Case Study in Engineering a Conversational Programming Assistant's Persona
This work addresses the need for more effective conversational programming tools for developers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing models without introducing new methods.
The authors tackled the problem of integrating a conversational chatbot into a code editor by using an existing large language model with a tailored prompt, resulting in the development of the Programmer's Assistant prototype that establishes a specific interaction style for software development.
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.