Write a reusable prompt template your whole team can use
Turning a prompt that works for you into one that works for someone who was not there when you wrote it.
Before you start
- A prompt you already use regularly
- Someone else who needs to use it
What you will be able to do
- Convert a working prompt into a slotted template
- Surface the assumptions you did not know you were making
- Version prompts so an improvement does not break someone else's use
Everyone eventually writes a prompt good enough to share, shares it, and watches it produce something worse for everyone else.
The cause is almost always the same: the prompt relied on context that was in your head, in the previous message, or in the document you happened to have open.
Replace the specifics with named slots
Explicit placeholders, in one block, so nothing gets missed.
Anything that changes per use becomes a clearly marked slot — [AUDIENCE], [SOURCE TEXT], [MAX LENGTH] — and every slot is listed once at the top rather than scattered through the body.
Naming them for the decision rather than the value is what makes them fillable: [TONE] leaves someone guessing, [TONE: formal / neutral / warm] does not.
- Slots in obvious brackets make an unfilled one visible at a glance, which is the most common failure when someone else uses your template.
Ship it with one worked example
A filled-in version teaches the template faster than instructions do.
Underneath the template, paste one complete example with every slot filled and the output it produced. This does two jobs: it shows the intended input granularity, and it sets the quality bar so people know when their result is wrong rather than merely different.
Warning Write down where it fails
The known limitation is the most valuable line in the document.
Every prompt has inputs it handles badly. Say so explicitly — "this does poorly on anything over 2,000 words" or "it invents structure when the source has none".
Without that line, the first person to hit the limitation concludes the template is broken and quietly stops using it. With it, they route around it and tell you.
A template with named slots, a worked example and a stated failure mode will survive being handed to someone else. One without them will not, however good it is on your machine.
Common questions
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