prompt: Working with helper prompts

In chores: A Collection of Large Language Model Assistants

Working with helper prompts

Description

The chores package provides a number of tools for working on system prompts. System prompts are what instruct helpers on how to behave and provide information to live in the models' "short-term memory."

⁠prompt_*()⁠ functions allow users to conveniently create, edit, remove, the prompts in chores' "prompt directory."

• prompt_new() creates a new markdown file that will automatically create a helper with the specified chore, prompt, and interface on package load. Specify a contents argument to prefill with contents from a markdown file on your computer or the web.

• prompt_edit() and prompt_remove() open and delete, respectively, the file that defines the given chore's system prompt.

The prompts you create with these functions will be automatically loaded when you next trigger the helper addin.

Usage

prompt_new(chore, interface, contents = NULL)

prompt_remove(chore)

prompt_edit(chore)

Arguments

chore	A single string giving a descriptor of the helper's functionality. Cand only contain letters and numbers.
interface	One of "replace", "prefix", or "suffix", describing how the helper will interact with the selection. For example, the cli helper "replace"s the selection, while the roxygen helper "prefixes" the selected code with documentation.
contents	Optional. Path to a markdown file with contents that will "pre-fill" the file. Anything file ending in .md or .markdown that can be read with readLines() is fair game; this could be a local file, a "raw" URL to a GitHub Gist or file in a GitHub repository, etc.

Value

Each ⁠prompt_*()⁠ function returns the file path to the created, edited, or removed filepath, invisibly.

See Also

The directory help-page for more on working with prompts in batch using ⁠directory_*()⁠ functions, and vignette("custom", package = "chores") for more on sharing helper prompts and using prompts from others.

Examples

if (interactive()) {
# create a new helper for chore `"boop"` that replaces the selected text:
prompt_new("boop")

# after closing the file, reopen with:
prompt_edit("boop")

# remove the prompt (next time the package is loaded) with:
prompt_remove("boop")

# pull prompts from files on local drives or the web with
# `prompt_new(contents)`. for example, here is a GitHub Gist:
# paste0(
#  "https://gist.githubusercontent.com/simonpcouch/",
#  "daaa6c4155918d6f3efd6706d022e584/raw/ed1da68b3f38a25b58dd9fdc8b9c258d",
#  "58c9b4da/summarize-prefix.md"
# )
#
# press "Raw" and then supply that URL as `contents` (you don't actually
# have to use the paste0() to write out the URL--we're just keeping
# the characters per line under 80):
prompt_new(
  chore = "summarize",
  interface = "prefix",
  contents =
    paste0(
      "https://gist.githubusercontent.com/simonpcouch/",
      "daaa6c4155918d6f3efd6706d022e584/raw/ed1da68b3f38a25b58dd9fdc8b9c258d",
      "58c9b4da/summarize-prefix.md"
    )
)
}

chores documentation built on June 8, 2025, 11:19 a.m.