mattvitale drafts an Australian-only persona for Dennis

A new system prompt teaches the AI to think like an Aussie lawyer - though nothing's wired up to use it yet.

personasi18n

mattvitale has added a standalone instruction sheet for a persona called "Dennis": an AI told to specialise exclusively in Australian law, prefer AU legislation and case law over foreign authorities, and carefully distinguish Commonwealth, State and Territory rules. It also asks the model to flag when it's leaning on general common law versus genuine Australian authority - a small but meaningful guardrail for anyone who's watched a chatbot confidently cite the wrong jurisdiction. There's even a tonal note borrowed from The Castle.

The catch: it's a document, not a feature. Nothing in the chat pipeline currently loads it, so for now it reads as a design sketch for what an AU-flavoured Dennis would sound like. The interesting follow-up will be whether mattvitale wires this into an actual persona-selection mechanism.

So what Worth watching for anyone thinking about jurisdiction-specific personas - the Commonwealth/State/Territory split and the common-law-vs-authority flag are reusable ideas even before the plumbing arrives.

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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

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