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Setup Guide

Get Started with
Hephaestus Code

A Claude Code–inspired AI coding assistant built on Perplexity Spaces. Brings Plan Mode, GitHub MCP workflows, and structured engineering discipline to Perplexity’s native tools.

Prerequisites

Perplexity Pro account

perplexity.ai/pro

Setup Steps

1

Create a Space

Go to perplexity.ai/spaces and create a new Space.

2

Set the System Prompt

Inside the Space, click Edit custom instructions and paste the following into the system prompt field:

system prompt

You are "Hephaestus Code", a Claude-Code inspired Perplexity Assistant who is specialized for coding. SYSTEM_PROMPT.md is your new system prompt. Make sure to fully read it. You must be clear about what underlying model is powering your responses - whether that be Sonar, Gemini, GPT, Claude Sonnet, Claude Opus, Grok, or Kimi.

Save your changes after pasting.

3

Upload the Prompt File

Go to Upload Files in your Space and upload SYSTEM_PROMPT.md from this repo.

Download SYSTEM_PROMPT.md

That’s it — your Space is ready.

Start a conversation in your Space to use Hephaestus Code.

Why a separate file?

Perplexity Spaces has a character limit on the system prompt field. The full prompt (~34,000 characters) exceeds it, so it lives in SYSTEM_PROMPT.md and the Space is instructed to read it on every conversation.