Building forms with the assistant

You can describe a form in plain language and let the assistant draft it for you in the form builder. The draft lands in the builder for you to check and adjust, and nothing is kept until you save the form.

Asking for a form

The assistant works on the form you have open in the form builder. To ask it for changes:

1. Open the form in the form builder (see Building input forms).
2. Open the assistant: select it at the top of the screen, or press Cmd + J (Ctrl + J on Windows and Linux).
3. Describe the form you want, or the change you want to make, and send it.

While the form is open, everything you ask is read as being about that form. The assistant sees the form exactly as it stands in the builder, including edits you have not saved, so it works from what you are looking at.

To start a form from nothing, open the assistant anywhere outside an editor and type what you need. Its empty conversation offers a shortcut to start a form: Pyron creates an untitled form, opens it in the builder with the assistant alongside, and sends what you typed as your first request. A form you start in the builder itself connects to the assistant once you have saved it for the first time — until then, the assistant answers as the general assistant rather than working on that form.

Writing a good request

The more specific the request, the closer the first draft. Name the questions you want, the kind of answer each one takes, the options for any choice list, and which questions must be answered. For example:

• "Build an incident form with the date and time, the site, a severity choice of Low, Medium or High, and a description of what happened."
• "Add a Yes / No question asking whether anyone was injured, and if the answer is yes, ask for their name."
• "Put the severity question at the top."
• "Make the description optional."
• "Reword the notes question to read: What else should we know?"

When you ask for a position — at the top, after a particular question, or several questions in a set order — the assistant places them exactly there and leaves the rest of the form in its existing order.

The assistant can work on everything about the form: its questions and their wording, the field types, choice lists and their options, which answers are required, the order and layout, and follow-up questions that appear only for certain answers. You can also ask it about the form — which questions are required, say — and it answers without changing anything. If what you need lives somewhere else in Pyron, it can point you to the right place.

Reviewing the draft

While the assistant works, it shows in plain words what it is doing. When it finishes, its draft lands in the builder in place of the form you had open, and its message in the conversation says the draft is in the builder and needs saving to keep. The header reads "Assistant's draft · not saved" until you save.

The builder marks what the draft changed against the form you had:

• A question it added says New.
• A question it changed says Changed, with what it was underneath, such as "Was optional".
• A question it removed stays in place, struck through, until you save.

Each marked question has an Undo that takes back that one change, so you can keep the new questions and turn down the rest. Press ⌘Z to take back the whole draft.

Before a draft reaches you, Pyron checks it against the same rules as a form you build by hand. If the draft breaks one, the assistant corrects it before showing you anything, so what lands in the builder is a form the builder accepts.

If you have unsaved changes in the builder when a draft arrives, Pyron asks before replacing them. Confirm to swap your unsaved changes for the draft (⌘Z brings them back), or cancel to keep your own work and leave the draft in the conversation for later.

The assistant edits your form in place rather than starting again. Questions you did not mention keep their wording, their settings and their position, so a request to change one question changes only that question.

What to check

Read the draft as you would a form a colleague handed you:

• Every question you asked for is there, with the kind of answer you expect.
• Each choice list holds the options you want, in the order you want.
• The required questions are the ones that must be answered before an entry can be saved.
• Follow-up questions appear for the right answers and stay hidden otherwise.
• The questions read in a sensible order.
• The form's name is right — a draft can rename the form as well as change its questions.

Use the builder's preview to fill in the form the way your team will see it, and try the answers that should reveal a follow-up.

Applying and iterating

A draft lives only in the builder until you save the form, and saving needs the same permission to edit forms as saving changes you make by hand. When you save a form the assistant drafted, Pyron shows what saving would do on a card first: select Apply to save it. A brand-new form that changes nothing else is saved straight away. If someone else saved the same form while you were working, Pyron warns you when you save rather than overwriting their changes.

To back out before saving, discard your unsaved changes and the builder returns to the last saved version of the form.

You do not need to get everything in one request. Keep asking in the same conversation — each follow-up builds on the form as it stands in the builder, so you can mix your own edits with the assistant's. Fix a label by hand, then ask the assistant to add three more questions; it keeps your fix.

Every draft stays in the conversation with an option to load it. Loading an earlier draft puts that version back in the builder, replacing what is there, which is a quick way to step back when a later change was not what you wanted. Loading the latest draft again restores it after you have edited over it.

If you come back to the form after a break, the assistant may start a fresh conversation and offer to resume the earlier one.