Australian-law persona prompt added as `prompts/dennis-system.md` (not yet wired in)

mattvitale commits a system-prompt definition for an Australian legal AI persona - jurisdiction-scoped to AU law, with Commonwealth/State/Territory disambiguation and a Castle-tone instruction. The file exists but isn't connected to the chat pipeline yet.

personasi18n

prompts/dennis-system.md is a 19-line markdown file defining a "Dennis" persona: AU law only, prioritise Australian legislation and case law over foreign authorities, distinguish Commonwealth/State/Territory jurisdiction, flag when reasoning from general common law versus specific Australian authority, explain technical terms in plain English alongside legal language.

A second commit (728ac563) refines the wording with no functional change - bolded headers, "specialise exclusively", "professional judgement" - the kind of polish that happens when you're iterating on a prompt offline before wiring it in.

Neither commit touches backend/ or frontend/. There's a new top-level prompts/ directory, but nothing loads from it. No system-prompt selection mechanism, no env var, no route. The file is effectively a spec for what the persona should do, not a deployed change.

The Commonwealth/State/Territory scoping instruction and the "flag common law vs AU authority" guideline are the most operationally useful pieces. If you're building any jurisdiction-specific variant, this is a decent reference for how to structure those distinctions in a system prompt.

So what Skip for now if you need functional code. Worth bookmarking if you're building a jurisdiction-scoped persona - the prompt structure is clean and the AU-specifics (state/territory/commonwealth split, common law flagging) are well thought through. Watch for the commit that actually wires this into a backend route; that's when it becomes worth evaluating properly.

View this fork on GitHub →

Spotted something wrong? Or know the PR text has fresher detail than the writeup above?

Commits in this thread

2 commits from mattvitale/Dennis-OSS, oldest first. Source extracted verbatim from the harvested git log.

SHA Subject Author Date
45caed84 Add dennis-system.md prompt mattvitale 2026-05-18 ↗ GitHub
728ac563 Improve dennis-system.md mattvitale 2026-05-18 ↗ GitHub

Capture this thread into my fork

Download a single Markdown prompt that tells Claude how to port every commit above into your working tree — adapting paths and structure to match your repo. Run it via claude -p < capture-thread-470.md from inside the repo you want the changes in.

⬇ Download capture-thread-470.md