Prompt Professor

I engineered a prompt to explain how to engineer a prompt.

It explains what prompt engineering is in five levels of complexity (for a 7 year old, for a high school student, etc). Just let it know when you have no more questions, and it’ll move on to the next tier of explanation.

Sentiment analysis bot

This bot has a prompt which causes it to analyze the emotional state of the user, and then use that analysis to decide when it should route the conversation to a human support agent. 

It then also explains to you the reasoning for its analysis and decisions. Usually this would be behind the scenes, but I made it frontend for the purposes of this test environment.

Storytelling bot

This prompt gets the bot to generate a story in the style of an author (user chosen, if the user would like). It’s designed to provide a few paragraphs of story, present a problem, then ask the user what they want to do about the problem. It should bring the story to a conclusion in a relatively short timeframe, then ask if the user wants to start another one.

Outsourcing my love life

On dating apps, I could use the profile’s short word count to try to squeeze in information about myself and some clever banter. Or I could use it to link to a virtual version of myself ladies can chat with. 

This one requires a very long prompt. On top of the instructions, it needs a lot of information about me including hobbies, personality, preferences, and I even fed it a bit of my writing so it can try to mimic my writing voice. 

One challenge with this bot is that it loves to make up false information about me. With this in mind, I added another experiment to it: Self-reporting made up info. In theory, this prompt should require the bot to end every message by telling you which information is directly from the prompt and which information it’s guessing and which information it entirely made up. 

Home page

Custom built bot greeter chatbot for my own page. This is my main project.

While I used existing code to design the UI of the other bots, this one I learned how to build from the ground up. I’m not a web developer so the design isn’t perfect, but I’m still proud to add these tools to my kit. It properly hyperlinks text, the window scrolls with the text, the responses stream in, it stores transcripts for quality review, and it even has a cute light mode / dark mode toggle.

Behind the scenes, another exciting development is applying the Assistant API, which opens the door to a whole world of tools I can add to this. The learning continues.

As for the system instructions, I’m pleased with how this bot remains conversational while also comfortably directing the user towards my goal: messaging me to schedule an appointment.

It goes through a flow of learning about the user’s business goals, explaining how my services can help, proving it with my portfolio links, then helping draft a message to schedule an appointment. Good bot 🤖