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Prompting

The Prompting screen shapes how your chatbot answers. It has a system prompt editor and a set of behaviour switches; each switch adds instructions to the prompt the model actually receives.

System Prompt

Write the instructions the chatbot follows in every conversation — its persona, the course or domain, what it should refuse, how to format answers. Then:

  • Update System Prompt saves your edits.
  • Optimize System Prompt rewrites your draft with an LLM; it needs a provider enabled on the LLMs page.
  • Prompt Builder opens a guided editor that assembles a prompt from your answers to a few questions.
  • Prompt Engineering Guide links to OpenAI's guide for writing good instructions.

Document Search Optimization

  • Smart Document Search — optimizes each question into a better search query before retrieval. Only the document search changes; the user's messages reach the model exactly as written.

AI Behavior Settings

  • Guided Learning — the chatbot encourages independent problem-solving with hints and questions instead of direct answers, while still finding and citing relevant materials. Enabled here, it applies to all users and they cannot switch it off.
  • Document-Based References Only — restricts the chatbot to information from your documents; useful where outside knowledge could be a problem, such as legal research.
  • Hide citations in chat responses — citations and sources are not shown on the chat screen.
  • Bypass Illinois Chat's internal prompting — the platform normally adds instructions to cite sources and to be as helpful as possible; this switch sends your system prompt alone. A Copy Illinois Chat's internal prompt button gives you that internal text as a starting point; only its citation format works with the citation links in chat.
  • Enable Agent Mode — runs a multi-step loop on the server that can search documents and call tools repeatedly before writing the final answer. Users see an Agent Mode pill next to the model picker.

Reset Prompting Settings returns every switch to its default. Generate Share Link builds a link to the chatbot that turns on Guided Learning, Document-Based References Only or the prompting bypass for whoever opens it, even if the chatbot-wide switches change later.