Lessons from Building an AI Copilot

Building an AI Copilot that can provide real value to users requires a thoughtful approach. It starts with embracing naïvety, where developers feed the model data and ask it to solve problems, but also recognizes its limitations. A playbook guides decision-making by documenting common problems and serving as a blueprint for guiding the LLM's behavior. Prompt engineering techniques such as few-shot prompting, chain-of-thought prompting, and tree-of-thought prompting can improve accuracy, while an agent-based approach involving specialized "expert" agents can optimize scalability. Continuous evaluation and feedback mechanisms are essential to track performance over time, and building a dataset is critical for model improvement. By following these strategies, developers can build an AI Copilot that empowers users.