College Essay Coach MVP

This project is a command-line-based Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for a College Essay Coach, an AI-powered conversational agent designed to help high school students brainstorm and structure their college application essays.

1. Project Structure

• main.py: The main entry point to run the application.
• agent.py: Contains the core logic for the conversational agent.
• prompts.py: Stores the system prompts and initial questions for the agent.
• pyproject.toml: Configuration for Poetry.
• .env.example: An example file for environment variables. You will need to create your own .env file.

2. Setup and Installation

Follow these steps to set up and run the project on your local machine.

Prerequisites

• Python 3.7+
• Poetry for package management
• An OpenAI API Key

Installation

1. Clone the repository (or set up the files as provided): Make sure you have all the project files (main.py, agent.py, prompts.py, pyproject.toml).

2. Install the dependencies: From the root of the project directory, run the following command. This will create a virtual environment and install all the necessary packages.

   poetry install

3. Set up your environment variables: Create a file named .env in the root of the project directory. Copy the contents of .env.example into it and add your OpenAI API key:

   OPENAI_API_KEY="your-actual-openai-api-key"
   

3. How to Run the Application

Once you have completed the setup, you can run the application directly using Poetry. This command will execute the script within the project's virtual environment.

poetry run python main.py

The conversational agent will start, and you can interact with it directly in your terminal.