Most teams build a prompt library, use it for three weeks, and quietly go back to typing from scratch. The ones that last tend to share a few habits.
Organise by job, not by tool
People look for prompts when they have a task, not when they have chosen a model. A library sorted by ChatGPT and Claude forces the reader to answer a question they do not care about. Sort by the work: hiring, support, SEO, analysis.
Every prompt needs three things
- What it produces, in one line, so someone can tell from the list whether it is the one they need.
- The prompt itself, copyable in one action.
- What to change before running it – the variables, marked clearly.
Fewer, better
Forty prompts that work beats four hundred that might. A library nobody has pruned becomes a search problem, and search problems are why people give up and type it themselves.
Assign an owner
Libraries rot because products change and nobody re-tests. One named person, one quarterly pass, removing what no longer works. Without that, the library becomes a museum.
Watch what gets copied
If you can see which prompts get used, you can see which parts of the library are dead weight. Cut them. The library gets better by shrinking more often than by growing.
