Sidekick

Table of contents

• Sidekick
  • Table of contents
• Description
• Guided tour
  • Login
  • Chat with OpenAI GPT-4 or GPT-3.5-turbo
  • Chat Prompt Templates
  • Chat context menu
  • Chat Prompt Editor
  • Mermaid diagrams
  • Pick from different AI personas
  • Ask again with different personas
  • Syntax highlighting of code
  • Change the AI model settings
  • Sidekick Prompt Composer
  • Sidekick Script
  • Sidekick Notes
  • Sidekick Manual
  • Sidekick AI Help
• Why Sidekick?
• Sidekick Features
• Sidekick Release Notes
• Usage
• Examples
• Running Sidekick
  • Prerequisites
  • Installation
  • Configuration
• About
  • License
  • Roadmap
• References

Description

Sidekick is an AI powered tool for creativity, thinking, learning, exploring ideas, problem-solving, knowledge-building, and getting things done.

It provides a chat interface to OpenAI's GPT models along with pre-canned AI personas and a prompt fragment library to help you get more out of the AI and a working environment where you can create notes by selecting the most interesting and useful parts of the chat to edit and organise into a more complete text aligned with what you want.

Guided tour

For more details, see the Sidekick manual For more insights on how to use Sidekick, ask the Sidekick AI Help

Login

Login, or create a new account if you don't already have one. Each user has their own database of chats and notes.

Chat with OpenAI GPT-4 or GPT-3.5-turbo

Once you have configured the app with your OpenAI API key, you can chat with the AI using the API. All your chats will be stored in Sidekick and you can edit them and use them to create notes.

Chat Prompt Templates

Clicking the Spanner button in the main toolbar or clicking the 'Prompt Engineer' button at the bottom of the Chat window opens the Prompt Engineer, which includes a selection of pre-canned prompt templates.

Click a template name to copy the template to the prompt window. Prompt templates have this structure:

Some prompt text with optional {PARAMETERS} that you can double click on to replace with your own text.

To save new prompt templates of your own, just add a prompt name like this above your prompt and click the save button.

Chat context menu

Right clicking on a message in the chat lets you copy it to the clipboard, copy it as HTML, append it to the prompt, use it as the prompt, append it to a note, append all messages to a note, delete it, or delete all messages. Curating the chat history by deleting individual messages that were not what you wanted can be a useful way to improve the AI's responses.

When text is selected, you can submit prompts provided in the Selection Actions sub-menu applied to that selection.

The Chat Actions sub-menu provides actions that can be applied to the whole chat.

Chat Prompt Editor

The Chat Prompt Editor lets you edit the prompt before sending it to the AI. You can use the prompt composer to build your prompt from a library of fragments, or you can use the prompt templates to get you started. The Prompt Editor has various commands and prompt templates available in its menu, which can also be accessed from the keyboard by pressing "/" when the prompt is empty.

When clicking on the prompt editor menu and selecting a prompt, you can press and hold the Alt key to put the prompt into the editor without running it so you can update it. When navigating the menus from the keyboard after pressing "/" in an empty prompt to open the menu, using right arrow on a template will place it in the editor. Clicking or pressing enter will run the template immediately, hence applying it to the content of the chat.

Prompts for methodologies and techniques

Clicking on the menu in the Prompt Editor, or pressing "/" in an empty prompt will open a menu of commands, tools, and templates.

Prompt Library (providing prompts or various methodologies and techniques) includes the following:

• Exploration
  • A list of questions designed to help you explore a topic
• Analysis methods
  • Balanced Scorecard
  • Benefits Analysis
  • Business Model Canvas
  • Competitive Analysis
  • Design Thinking
  • Failure Mode Effects Analyusis (FMEA)
  • Gap Analysis
  • Kano Model Analysis
  • Market Entry Strategy
  • MoSCoW Prioritisation
  • PEST Analysis
  • Porters Five Forces
  • Root Cause Analysiss
  • SMART Goals
  • Six Thinking Hats
  • Stakeholder Analysis
  • SWOT Analysis
  • Value Chain Analysis
  • VPEC-T Analysis
  • Wardley Mapping
  • What If Analysis
  • Why-Why Analysis
• Creativity methods
  • Ansoff Matrix
  • SCAMPER
  • Mind Mapping
  • Brainwriting
  • Six Thinking Hats
  • Five Whys
  • Storyboarding
  • Analogical Thinking
  • Attribute Listing
  • TRIZ
  • Random Input
  • Forced Association
  • Lotus Blossom
  • Reverse Thinking
  • Future Scenarios
  • Provocation
  • Role Storming
  • Wishful Thinking
  • Checklists
  • Morphological Analysis
  • Boundary Relaxation
• Insights
  • A list of questions designed to help you gain insights into a topic

You can access the prompt library methods and commands from the prompt editor menu or by pressing "/" in an empty prompt.

Diagrams

The diagram prompts instruct the AI to create mermaid markdown diagrams that Sidekick then renders. You can develop these diagrams further conversationally by saying how you want them modified.

Diagrams include:

• Flowchart
• Mind Map
• Use Case Diagram
• Functional Decomposition Diagram
• Sequence Diagram
• Class Diagram
• Perimeter Diagram
• Entity Relationship Diagram
• State Diagram
• Timeline
• Gantt Chart

You can also use these as a basis for describing your own dirgam types within the limitations of what mermaid supports. You can access diagram prompts from the prompt editor menu or by pressing "/" in an empty prompt.

Pick from different AI personas

The Personas tool lets you change the persona of the AI so the response can be provided from a perspective that suits your purpose. You can filter personas by name, keywords in their profile, and favourite status. So you can search for personas that are good at a particular topic or that have a particular personality. E.g. try searching for expert, creative, logic, company.

Ask again with different personas

Different personas can give you different perspectives on the same prompt.

Syntax highlighting of code

Code blocks are syntax highlighted.

Change the AI model settings

Model settings lets you change the model and the temperature and other settings to alter (creativity / consistency) of the response.

Sidekick Prompt Composer

Prompt composer lets you build your prompt from a library of fragments.

Sidekick Script

Sidekick Script can be created in a jupyter notebook style tool that lets you create cells of different types including text, lists, and templates to parameterise prompts for querying the AI.

Here is an example script to generate a quiz where the number of questions, topic areas, themes, methods for creating questions, and difficulty levels are parameterised. The script uses the AI to generate the questions and answers:

Sidekick Notes

Sidekick Notes lets you create and edit notes. You can also import and export notes as text files, copy selected AI responses over from the chat window, and use the NoteWriter AI to write your note for you by telling it what you want.

Notes let you edit the content in plain text markdown and then render a view with the formatting applied.

Sidekick Manual

The Sidekick Manual explains the features of the tool, the ideas behind them, how to use Sidekick and different scenarios you can use it for.

Sidekick AI Help

Sidekick AI Help lets you ask questions of the manual rather than reading it!

It also draws on the knowledge of GPT to expand on the principles outlined in the manual, which includes innovation techniques as well as descriptions of how the tool can be used, and provides examples of how to apply the tool to what you are working on.

Why Sidekick?

Everyone has access to Generative AI in the form of ChatGPT and other tools. However most of these tools are designed for general use and are built on top of APIs that are more powerful under the hood. Many of the out-of-the-box tools also use the prompts users enter to further train their models. This is generally not the case for the APIs.

Sidekick is intended as a tool for people who want to use Generative AI to help them think, explore ideas, solve problems, build knowledge, and get things done. It is designed to be easy to use and to help you get the most out of the AI.

It's also using the APIs directly, so once you get your API key you can deploy Sidekick wherever you want and use it without having to worry about your prompts being used to train the AI. As all the code is provided you can also extend it or modify it to suit your needs.

GenAI has much more potential than chat. OpenAI have been making it easier to build on the models by adding features to the API. For example, You can write a program to call GPT-4 and tell it about other APIs you have access to and what they do so that as part of GPT-4's response to your prompt, it can ask you to make calls to those other APIs to get more information. This means you can integrate the 'AI in the cloud' to other information sources you have, and use its intelligence to build automations and enable it to answer questions based on realtime data or data only you have access to.

Sidekick v0 is the beginning of a project to provide a platform for extending and integrating AIs with information sources and other APIs to build a new kind of AI-powered tool for creativity, thinking, exploring ideas, problem-solving, knowledge-building, and getting things done.

You can either just deploy this and let it run, or you can use it as a starting point to build your own AI-powered tools.

Sidekick Features

• Chat with an AI
• Change the persona of the AI
• Re-ask the same questions of the AI with different personas
• Compose your prompt from a library of fragments
• Create and edit notes
• Augment notes with the best parts from your chats
• Export notes
• Import notes
• Use the Note Writer to write your note for you
• Add notes to the AI knowledge library so they can be used as knowledge in Chat
• Use the AI knowledge library to augment the AI's knowledge
  • Create notes defining concepts of information that you want the AI to know about
  • Click the book icon at the bottom of the Chat window to load notes as knowledge for use in that chat
  • Your notes will be added into the user prompt automatically to provide context for the AI to respond to your prompt
  • Add knowledge notes about you and how you want the AI to behave, what you are interested in, or specific knowledge relevant to you the AI doesn't know about

Sidekick Release Notes

Go here: Release notes

Usage

1. From the home page
   1. Click the Explore Chats button to show or hide the Chat Explorer view
   2. Click the Chat button to show or hide the Chat Window
   3. Click the Notes button to show or hide the Notes Explorer view
   4. Click the Personas button to change the persona of the AI
   5. Click the Prompt Composer button to show or hide the prompt composer
2. When in the Chat Window
   1. Enter a prompt
   2. Click the Chat button or hit return to chat with the AI
   3. Chats are saved automatically
   4. Click in the name field at the top of the chat if you want to rename it. Escape clears the name so you can enter a new one.
3. Right click on a chat to:
   1. Copy it to the clipboard
   2. Copy as HTML to the clipboard, where responses are in markdown formatting
   3. Append to chat prompt, e.g. to refer to all or part of a previous response
   4. Use as chat prompt, e.g. to edit and continue the conversation
   5. Append to note, e.g. to save the most interesting and useful parts of the chat
   6. Append all to note, to save the whole chat into a note along with other chats or your own notes or to edit it
   7. Delete it from the chat history so it doesn't impact the AI's future responses
   8. Delete all messages to clear the chat and start again
4. Click the Notes button to show or hide the Notes Explorer view
5. From the Notes Explorer view
   1. Filter notes by name
   2. Bulk delete filtered notes that are no longer required
   3. Click on a note to edit it (there is a delete button in the note editor if you want to delete it)
6. When in a Note
   1. Click the Export button to download a note as a local text file
   2. Click the Import button to import a local text file into the current note
   3. Enter a prompt at the bottom of the note and click the Chat button or hit return to chat with the AI about the note
7. Click the Model Settings button to open the Model Settings, where you can:
   1. Change the model
   2. Change the temperature and other model settings to alter (creativity / consistency) of the response

Examples

• How can I use Sidekick to help me develop an IT Transformation Strategy?

Running Sidekick

Prerequisites

• You will need your own OpenAI API key to use this application. You can get one here.
• Tech stack is: Python Flask NodeJS React MaterialUI, and you will need pipenv, npm, python3

Installation

See the Local installation guide for how to get this up and running.

Configuration

The plan is to make all configuration editable from the user interface. For now, you can configure the application by editing the JSON configuration files.

To see how to change the way the application is installed and run and where it stores its settings and data, see the configuration guide.

About

This project is in active development, however each release is intended to be ready to use and feature complete as far as it has so far been developed.

Contribution guidelines for this project

License

MIT License

Roadmap

This project is in active development. You can see the roadmap here.

References

Go here: References