Personas: Switch the System Prompt Without Rewriting It
· 5 min read
The system prompt is the most powerful setting in DevoxxGenie and the one nobody touches twice. You write a good one, it works, and then it quietly becomes wrong for half of what you do. The prompt that makes a model a great pair programmer — write the code, be concrete, show me the diff — is exactly the prompt that makes it a mediocre reviewer, because a reviewer that starts rewriting your method has stopped reviewing it.
The usual workaround is to argue with the model in the prompt itself: "don't implement anything, just review". It works about as often as it doesn't.
Personas, new in DevoxxGenie 1.12.0, fix this the boring way: give each role its own system prompt, name it, and put the names in a dropdown.