Help Copilot — prompt patterns¶
The widget is tuned for how-to and discovery prompts. Below are the patterns that work best and the patterns that get handed off to the full Loom Copilot at /copilot.
What works well¶
Conceptual¶
- "What is CSA Loom?"
- "What's the difference between a Lakehouse and a Warehouse in Loom?"
- "How does Direct Lake parity work?"
- "What's a data product?"
Setup / deployment¶
- "How do I deploy Loom to a new Azure subscription?"
- "What roles does the deployment service principal need?"
- "How do I configure Power BI tenant settings for embedded?"
Navigation¶
- "Open the workspaces page"
- "Take me to the data agent"
- "Where do I see the Activator rules?"
(The Copilot will call openLoomPage and the widget auto-navigates 800ms after the answer renders so you can read the explanation first.)
Code / repo lookups¶
- "Where does the synapse SQL client live?"
- "What endpoints exist for workspaces?"
- "Where is the editor for Power BI Reports defined?"
Diagnostics¶
- "Is AOAI wired in this deployment?"
- "What tenant am I in?"
- "What's the current Loom version?"
- "Is AI Search configured?"
Reporting¶
- "I think there's a bug in the notebook ribbon — file an issue."
(The Copilot will draft a title + body and ask you to confirm before calling logIssue. With no GitHub token, it returns a deep link to the issue-new URL.)
What gets handed off to /copilot¶
Anything that acts on Azure state:
- "Create a workspace called Foo."
- "Run the daily-refresh pipeline."
- "Pause the dedicated SQL pool."
- "Deploy a notebook from this Git path."
For these the Help Copilot returns an explanation and a handoff block. The widget renders a "Switch to Loom Copilot for this action" button that opens /copilot with the prompt prefilled.
What it refuses¶
- Inventing doc content. If
searchDocsreturns nothing relevant, the Help Copilot says so and suggests where to look. - Calling out tenant secrets. Diagnostic results include endpoint URLs and resource IDs, but not access tokens or session cookies.
- Modifying state. Every tool the widget has is read-only or navigation-only.
logIssueis the one exception, and it confirms with the user before calling.
Tips for sharper answers¶
- Use 2-5 keywords when asking. The retriever ranks better on focused queries than on full sentences.
- If the answer cites a stale doc, follow the citation link, edit the source, and call
POST /api/help-copilot/reindexto refresh. - For "where is X in code" prompts, prefer
searchRepophrasing: "Where in the repo is the synapse client defined?" beats "Show me synapse code."