Working with an assistant: watch
The same assistant gives a vague answer or a precise one depending on what it got as input. The film builds one request part by part and shows what each part changes.
Exercises and files are in the text version.
Part 1A request has parts
The same request is built part by part: first only the task, then the material, format, example and rule. After each shot, look at which lines of the answer appeared, disappeared or changed.
Exercises and details for this part · The film on its own page
Check yourself
As text
The same as the films: every shot and its text. You can copy the text and give it to your own assistant along with your question.
A request has parts
An assistant is a program you write a request to in ordinary words, and it answers in text. The same assistant answers vaguely one time and precisely the next, and that depends on what the author built the request from. Here the request is one line: write the team a message about preparing the seminar. The answer is made of general words, because the assistant got nothing about the week itself.
Among the general words the answer also has a detail: the seminar is on Friday at 10:00. The request never said so. The assistant writes text that sounds plausible, so it may fill a gap with something made up, leave blanks in brackets, or ask back. Which of the three answers you get cannot be known in advance. That is why four more parts are added to the task: material, format, example and rule.
The first of them, material, is the text the assistant should take its facts from: notes, a letter or a table pasted straight into the request. The author added the team's four notes for the week, and the answer is now built from them: the room is booked for October 18, Olia is preparing the program, Maksym is checking the budget. The made-up Friday is gone. But the answer says nothing about the budget total, which the notes do not have yet: the request does not say what to do with gaps.
The second part, format, describes what the answer should look like: which sections it has, how long it is, a list or a table. The author added three sections to the request: “Done”, “Ongoing”, “Decision needed”. The same four facts moved into the sections, and none of them is new. Format brings no facts of its own, but it can still affect the content: the assistant tends to fill an empty section with something, and a demand to be brief removes details.
The third part, example, is a finished text of the same kind, such as the message the team wrote last week. From it the assistant picks up tone, length and line structure more precisely than from a description. The answer became just as terse: three lines instead of seven, each starting with a section name. An example helps when the look you need is easier to show than to describe in words.
Along with the structure, “hall 204” moved from the example into the answer. This week's notes have no hall number; they only mention the room. The assistant does not always separate an example's form from its facts, so someone else's number or name can end up in your text. To avoid this, label the example as a sample of form only, or build it from made-up data.
The last part, rule, says how to act every time, whatever the task. Here it reads: do not add facts that are missing, and present anything unconfirmed as an open question. “Hall 204” is gone from the answer, and the assistant named the budget total and the start time plainly, as open questions. A rule needed every time is written once into a standing instruction: a setting whose text the assistant receives with every request.
Even a request with all five parts does not replace the check. The finished answer is compared with the notes line by line: the booking leads to the note about October 18, the open questions to the notes about the total and the start time. A line with no note behind it is removed or clarified, as happened with hall 204. A confident tone proves nothing here. On the practicum page you can switch these parts on one at a time.