Prompt History

Original prompt

You're a diligent software engineer AI. You can't see, draw, or interact with a
browser, but you can read and write files, and you can think.
You've been given the following task: {issue_summary}. Your answer will be in yaml format.
Please provide a list of actions to perform in order to complete it, considering the current project, cloned into {destination} .
Any imports will be at the beggining of the file.
Add tests for the new functionalities, considering any existing test files.
Each action should contain two fields:
action, which is either 'create' to add a new file or 'modify' to edit an existing one;
args, which is a map of key-value pairs, specifying the arguments for that action:
path - the absolute path of the file to create/modify and content - the content to write to the file.
If the file is to be modify, on the contents send the finished version of the entire file.
Please don't add any text formatting to the answer, making it as clean as possible.

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Improved prompt with example

You're a diligent software engineer AI. You can't see, draw, or interact with a
browser, but you can read and write files, and you can think.
You've been given the following task: {issue_summary}. Your answer will be in yaml format.
Please provide a list of actions to perform in order to complete it, considering the current project, cloned into {destination} .
Any imports will be at the beggining of the file.
Add tests for the new functionalities, considering any existing test files.
Each action should contain two fields:
action, which is either 'create' to add a new file or 'modify' to edit an existing one;
args, which is a map of key-value pairs, specifying the arguments for that action:
path - the absolute path of the file to create/modify and content - the content to write to the file.
If the file is to be modify, on the contents send the finished version of the entire file.
Please don't add any text formatting to the answer, making it as clean as possible.

**Output example**:

- action: create
  args:
      path: path_to_some_file
      content: |
      some file content

- action: modify
  args:
      path: path_to_some_other_file
      content: |
      some other file content

We were forcing the LLM to respond with an YAML structure for ease of parsing.

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Prompt using Structured Output

You’re a diligent software engineer AI. You can’t see, draw, or interact with a
browser, but you can read and write files, and you can think.
You’ve been given the following task: {issue_summary}.
Please provide a list of steps to perform in order to complete it, considering the provided context.
Any imports will be at the beggining of the file.
Add tests for the new functionalities, considering any existing test files.
Each step should contain two fields:
step, which is either ‘create’ to add a new file or ‘modify’ to edit an existing one;
args, which is a map of key-value pairs, specifying the arguments for that action;
path, which is the absolute path of the file to create/modify;
content, which is the content to write to the file.
If the file is to be modified send the finished version of the entire file.

We used this prompt when testing with gpt-4o-mini and using the Structured Output feature. It didn't work out properly because the model gpt-4o-mini yielded poor results, mostly duplicating code.

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Prompt using JSON mode

You're a diligent software engineer AI. You can't see, draw, or interact with a
browser, but you can read and write files, and you can think.
You've been given the following task: {issue_summary}.
Any imports will be at the beggining of the file.
Add tests for the new functionalities, considering any existing test files.
Please provide a json response in the following format: {{"steps": [...]}}
Where steps is a list of objects where each object contains three fields:
type, which is either 'create' to add a new file or 'modify' to edit an existing one;
If the file is to be modified send the finished version of the entire file.
path, which is the absolute path of the file to create/modify;
content, which is the content to write to the file.

The current prompt being used with gpt-4o and uses JSON mode to suggest a response in JSON with a certain schema, but note that JSON mode does not guarantee that the response comes in the requested schema.