  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.
