· 4 min read
The prompt is the product
prompts engineering
The shift in mindset
For most teams, prompts live in a Notion page, a .txt file in someone’s home directory, or worse: hardcoded in a route handler. None of those treat the prompt as what it actually is — the specification of behavior.
When the prompt is the spec, three things change:
- It needs to be versioned the way code is.
- It needs evals the way code has tests.
- It needs review the way code has PRs.
A simple discipline
Move every production prompt into your repo. Give it a path, a version, and an owner. Pair it with a folder of evaluation cases. Run the evals in CI. When the prompt changes, the evals run; when the evals fail, the merge blocks.
That’s the floor. From there, you can build prompt registries, A/B testing, and the rest. But until you do this, your team is shipping product with no spec.