Build Your Own Prompt Library

Steps

1. 01Mine your history for what you actually reuse

   Go through your last month of AI conversations and pull out every prompt you have written more than once, in any form. That list is your real library. It is usually shorter and more boring than the one you would design from scratch, which is the point.

2. 02Give each one a fixed record

   For every prompt, write down: what it is for, the prompt itself, an example of good output, and what it is bad at. The last field is the one everybody skips and the one that saves you from using a prompt in a situation it was never good at.

3. 03Organise by task, not by tool

   Group by what you are trying to do — summarising, drafting, critiquing, extracting — rather than by which model you used. Tools change every few months; tasks do not, and a library organised by tool needs reorganising every time you switch.

4. 04Test each prompt on a fresh input

   Run every prompt once against input it has not seen. Some will fail, because they were quietly relying on context earlier in an old conversation. Fix or delete them now rather than discovering it under time pressure.

5. 05Version instead of overwriting

   When you improve a prompt, keep the old one and note what changed and why. You will occasionally find the "improvement" was worse for a case you had forgotten about, and without the old version you cannot go back.

If you want to go further

• Add a "prompts that failed and why" section — it is the most instructive part
• Share three with a colleague and note where they had to change them

Useful alongside this

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