Introduction
Driver is a powerful platform that allows you to generate documentation with Driver Docs and create custom, technical documentation from the sources you provide with Driver Studio. Our Smart Instructions feature helps you generate prompts that serve as the basis for this custom documentation.
Generating content with Smart Instructions is very simple and open-ended. While this makes them easy to use and flexible, there is a bit of a learning curve before getting the most out of Smart Instructions and Driver as a whole. This guide will help you get past that learning curve quickly.
Theory of Operation
To start, it is helpful to think about the basics of what you are asking Driver to do with each of your Smart Instructions.
Fundamentally, Driver uses your Smart Instruction for two things. The first is to search for the relevant content in the sources you provide (Driver Docs, codebases, and PDF’s). The second is to use the search results with your prompt as context to generate a draft of the desired content. If you keep these two things in mind, writing good Smart Instructions will be much more intuitive.
Smart Instruction Best Practices: Writing Great Prompts
Gaining skill in writing Smart Instruction prompts is key to getting the most value out of Pages and Driver as a whole. While Driver has robust search capabilities and sophisticated prompt augmentation features under the hood, employing the following eight tips will allow you to supercharge its performance.
Ruthlessly avoid ambiguity
Driver can accommodate a lot of ambiguity. This can be a superpower in cases where you want to get some content quickly and may not even be sure what to write about. For fine-grained control, however, craft prompts that make your instructions as explicit as possible. Driver will happily fill in the blanks if you don’t, but it may not be with what you want.
Describe what NOT to do
The flip side of the coin to the above is to simply instruct Driver on what not to do.
Don’t ask for too much at once
There is a practical limit to the amount of content Driver can draft with a single Smart Instruction. Whenever possible, break down requests into multiple Smart Instructions, each with a more narrowly focused topic or concept.
Peel back the onion
Peeling back the onion is an expression that refers to the process of gradually uncovering deeper layers of meaning, understanding, or complexity in a situation, just as peeling an onion reveals layer after layer beneath its surface. This approach can be helpful when you are not deeply familiar with the sources. Prompt Driver to generate conceptual overviews and then use it to dive deeper into some of the resulting topics with more specificity in new Smart Instructions.
Shrink the context
As mentioned in the Theory of Operation section above, Smart Instructions are fundamentally about search. Keeping the search space as small as possible will lighten Driver’s load and lead to better performance. Is there a bunch of test code in your codebase that isn’t relevant to what you are writing about? Use tuning to eliminate it from the scope. Know ahead of time that Driver should reference code in a specific file or folder? Call that out in your Smart Instruction prompt.
There is no free lunch
Unlike Driver Docs, which is fully automated, Driver Studio is an interactive writing aid. Driver Studio is here help you search for and extract knowledge from your sources and use it to craft high-quality technical documentation. Driver will help you get there faster than ever before, but it's up to you to get across the finish line.
Iterate
Especially when you are first getting started with Smart Instructions, iterate on your prompts to nudge Driver to generate the content you want to see. This will give you an opportunity to see how applying these best practices can improve performance.
Don’t forget you can type
The flip side of iteration is that you can get stuck in a loop trying to get Driver to generate something very specific. Remember that Driver is here to help you write documentation faster. It’s important to recognize when manually editing or writing content is the best approach.